Gratitude is a wonder drug: We need to listen to each other and find the common ground

When the British neurologist Oliver Sacks’s 46-page “Gratitude” appeared in print in November 2015, Sacks had already been dead for three months.

The book contains four short essays he wrote for The New York Times during the last two years of his life, each a canticle of thanksgiving, honoring the people and things he was grateful for.

As an M.D., Sacks had dedicated himself to helping people afflicted by the weirdest neurological problems. In a 1985 essay, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” he told the story of a brilliant music teacher whose brain malfunctioned so that he could not identify certain shapes.

Upon leaving Sacks’s office, he reached for his hat only to discover he had taken hold of his wife’s head. The diagnosis was visual agnosia.

In the last two years of his life, when death was “no longer an abstract concept” but “an all-too-close, not-to-be-denied presence,” Sacks says in “Gratitude,” his feeling remained predominantly “one of gratitude.”

He said he was grateful for all the things “I had been given by others” but was also grateful because he was “able to give something back” through his work. He said how wonderful it was he had been blessed with a calling in life, a vocation, which helped him achieve “a sense of peace within.”

Sacks did not wait for national Thanksgiving Day in November to express his appreciation for what he had; his feelings arose on their own accord. Indeed, he seems to marvel at just how grateful he was.

It’s interesting to trace the pathways of Sacks’s life and how gratitude made its way into his feeling structure. Oddly enough, his essays come at a time when an extensive national literature on gratitude is appearing in major newspapers, magazines, and on national radio shows.

In almost every case what’s said emphasizes gratitude’s connection to happiness, which Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, and Hindu texts claim exists. The late German sociologist Georg Simmel called gratitude “one of the most powerful binding agents of society,” “the moral memory of mankind.” A community-maker.

What’s most gratifying, if you will, is that a small group of university researchers have begun to look at the link between gratitude and happiness. Robert Emmons, a psychology professor at the University of California-Davis has been interested in the social and biological benefits of gratitude.

He said his research shows that people disposed to gratefulness develop stronger immune systems, their blood pressure drops, they’re less bothered by aches and pains, they fare better at resisting stress, and they develop a deeper sense of self-worth. What more needs be said? It’s a wonder drug.

In 2003, Emmons published the results of a study he did with colleague Michael McCullough in an article “Counting blessings versus burdens.” The two said people who experience gratitude tend to view life-events as positive when those events can be just as easily viewed as negative. Gratitude people are able to maintain a mindset that cherishes the moment.

In a December 2015 New York Times piece, “The Selfish Side of Gratitude,” Barbara Ehrenreich said one must be careful when talking about accepting negatives in relation to gratitude. She said feeling gratitude is not always an appropriate response to “blessings.”

“Suppose you were an $8-an-hour Walmart employee,” she asks, “who saw her base pay elevated this year, by company fiat, to $9 an hour. Should you be grateful to the Waltons who are the richest family in America? Or to Walmart’s chief executive, whose annual base pay is close to $1 million and whose home sits on nearly 100 acres of land in Bentonville, Ark?”

Ehrenreich answers her own question: “Grateful people have been habitually dismissed as ‘chumps,’ and in this hypothetical [Walmart] case, the term would seem to apply.”

She sees the relation between justice and gratitude. That is, can we expect someone to feel gratitude if he’s being taken to the cleaners but the offending party provides an Uber?

The Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast has spent a good piece of his life trying to understand gratitude. His conclusion is: Gratefulness is critical for personal well-being because gratitude is the source of happiness in our lives.

Then he went a step further in a recent TED talk, stating it’s not enough to be grateful for what comes our way; we must live gratefully. It’s an active thing.

He says this happens when we agree that “every moment is a given moment ... a gift.” And each moment provides the opportunity for us to not only “enjoy it” but also “do something with it” and, when we avail ourselves of these opportunities, things tend to perk up.

But Steindl-Rast says that, because people rush “through life [they] are not stopping to see the opportunity,” which might involve doing something difficult like standing “up for [one’s] conviction.”

Therefore each person must stop and look and become aware of the opportunities, “to whatever life offers ... in the present moment.” When we do this, he says, we become revolutionaries of a whole other order.

This includes enjoying “the differences between people ... [being] respectful to everybody” because we are not driven to submit to condescension. With gratitude, we want to listen to each other and find the common ground that is the basis of happiness.

On Nov. 28, 1861, eight months after the Civil War began, Abraham Lincoln ordered all governmental departments to close for a day of Thanksgiving. He was asking America to stop and look and become aware of its common ground, and be thankful for who we are.

Then, after two years of a suicidal war, Lincoln — inspired by Sarah Josepha Hale — declared the last Thursday of every November a national day of “Thanksgiving and Praise.” His proclamation begins, “The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come … .”

He said they come from God but we know it’s each other.

Of course “turkey day” is a time for enjoying good food, good drink, and good conversation but it’s also a time for self-reflection to assess where “equal respect,” a condition of gratitude, fits into our lives.

Oliver Sacks, David Steindl-Rast, and Abraham Lincoln, each in his own way, would agree that that is what gratitude ultimately affords, an appreciation of the other as we appreciate ourselves.

Happy Thanksgiving.