After two months of writing in a Gratitude Journal I have decided to stop. I learnt through doing this about the nature and process by which you may arrive at gratitude. As a practice I think it has made me aware of the need to express one's gratitude more vocally in person, when it is an appreciation of someone, or what they have done for you. Just writing down that I'm grateful, has felt on such occasions simply insufficient as a response. This article is by way of a conclusion, with how I am now viewing gratefulness.
Gratefulness, is not a perception, its an outcome, its a feeling that arises within you. This arrives because we have looked, and we have seen, truly seen something. Having become aware of it, you more fully appreciate its value, for what it has given you. Depending on the depth of our appreciation, we may feel an up-welling of gratitude. For how something or someone is embellishing and enriching your life. This is the fullest purest form of what gratefulness can be.
It is not about you picking up a cup of tea and saying to yourself 'I will feel grateful for this' At times the journal did feel clunky like that. It can seem a confection, the contrivance of an outcome. My writing in my Gratitude Journal was always likely to be tainted with artifice of some kind. Behaving as if merely by the act of writing something down gratefulness would develop, it is a bit of a conceit. In its most natural form gratefulness rarely arrives that way. This doesn't necessarily undermine the purpose of my writing about it. Intended as it was, as an action that would stimulate thought and awareness. But it has also highlighted the limitations of keeping a journal, as a practice.
By writing about it, I was forced into analysing it, and that easily became like performing a scientific dissection. That may also act as an attunement, a tuning in to gratefulness. But that doesn't in my experience make you more grateful necessarily. If it could encourage you to identify then express your gratefulness, publicly and vocally, this would only ever be a good thing.
I've come to a conclusion, which once I reached it made perfect sense. so much so I wondered why I hadn't seen it sooner. But once I did, I realised I didn't necessarily need to continue the Gratitude Journal.* Everything starts with looking, becoming more aware. It is probably more effective to cultivate a deeper awareness of things, of others, of reality, first and foremost. Out of which gratefulness may or may not emerge. Looking back this is what the Gratitude Journal has largely been, an exercise in developing awareness and applying an appreciative eye.
Like any other experience gratefulness is a multi-facted conditioned event. It depends on the quality of your perceptions primarily, followed by the degree of ones own sensitivity and ability to express one's feelings and responses. It is in many ways very similar to happiness, you cannot consciously make yourself happy. Likewise, you cannot make yourself grateful by force of will, you can only create the conditions for it.
Things arise and cease all the time. What arises and what ceases changes the nature of our conscious experience. The quality of our awareness, of our appreciative eye, of what we see and the way that we see it, within the surrounding conditions in which our lives are taking place, forms whatever will follow. One consequence would be gratitude.
Its like seed planting. We can have the seed of an idea, to be more grateful, say. And we plant it in the ground of our conscious awareness. Depending upon how we tend to it thereafter, it may or may not grow into a fully fledged plant that forms blossom. Planting it in soil does not in itself guarantee it will germinate. We mostly have to travel hopefully, keep watering and tending to it, but surrendering the outcome to whatever. This means we should never stop encouraging ourselves to be more grateful as we proceed through our lives. Every now and then it will arise and take you completely by surprise, but Hey! - you will be more than ready.
*I have since converted my Gratitude Journal, at least for the foreseeable future, into an Awareness Journal, written of course with an appreciative eye.
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