A 'Zoom' Perspective For Gratitude
How to be grateful when we aren't necessarily feeling it
We know that gratitude is important for our mental health. It’s a practice that is talked about a lot. We regularly tell ourselves and others, including our family and children, to appreciate what we have. Just last weekend, when one of my sons was complaining that his brother had more Easter eggs than him, I found myself (typically) saying to him “Please be grateful for how many you have. Think of all those children who went without this year!”
It was only a few moments later when I felt my own internal ball of frustration erupt having been followed into my bedroom by one of my children for the fifth time that day. My mind eagerly jumped in to collude with this felt frustration. Why can’t I get just 5 minutes of peace! My own gratitude - thankful for being loved and needed by my three children and the rare increased time I have with them right now - was in that moment nowhere to be seen.
So what does being grateful actually mean? And how do we helpfully and authentically practice gratitude at a time of all this change and uncertainty. When we may be feeling stressed, unhappy, disconnected and fearful…. When we may be experiencing the loss of jobs, financial hardship, or a restricted sense of freedom…. When we may be feeling anything but grateful.
Given that gratitude is being thankful for what we have in our lives, it all depends on the perspective we have in any given moment. Our perspective is often short and narrow. By default, our focus is zoomed up really close to what is happening in the personal sphere of our own life. Think of it like a camera lens - when our perspective is this narrow, we are focusing on and feeling what is right in front of us. This is a necessary perspective to engage and deal with what’s in front of us and to feel the fullness of our experiences. After all, it would be pretty hard to fully feel the connection with the person I am hugging, or to be immersed in the that task that I am completing, or to avoid colliding with the car slowing down in front of me, if my zoom lens is pulled back and I perceiving all of these occurrences from a distance.
There are however, times when it is helpful for our lens to be zoomed out a little… or even a lot. To open up our perspective to what is happening beyond this moment, day or current situation. And at times to zoom out even further to look beyond the contents of our own lives and to capture the bigger context of the world that we are living in. To look at the ‘bigger picture’. This helps us to see beyond our own difficulties and to notice the situations of others. And it allows us to acknowledge the aspects of our lives that we may be grateful for, but we aren’t seeing at that moment because of our lens being too close.
This zoomed out and bigger perspective does not mean that we are not still feeling the hardness in what we are dealing with right now. The hardness is still there. After all, we only experience distress about things that matter to us. Therefore, we need to allow those feelings to be there - to acknowledge their presence and be self-compassionate for how big they can feel in the orbit of our own lives.
Rather, the zoomed out perspective and acknowledging what else we can choose to be grateful for helps us to carry the hardness a little more easily. It helps us to see underneath and beyond it, and to look at the goodness in our life that is also there, just waiting to be seen. It is therefore not about minimising our experience, rather it’s about maximising the entirety of our experience.
The key to gratitude is therefore knowing that we can zoom out when we need to. And when we do, allowing both the hardness and the goodness to be in our picture, together at the same time.