Early this morning, as my dog, Hank, and I walked our two miles, I was filled with an overwhelming gratitude for so many things. I realized that it is as essential to count one’s blessings as it is to breathe, because gratitude is the essential ingredient for living a joy-filled life.

I am reading a book called, “Feeling Blah?”: Why Anhedonia Has Left You Joyless and How to Recapture Life’s Highs, by Tanith Carey. In this book, the author describes the phenomenon of anhedonia, (coming from a Greek word meaning ‘without pleasure’) which describes the ‘blah’ state in which many of us are living, especially post-Covid. While I have not yet finished the book, the author makes the case that our modern life, especially in the developed world, lays everything at our fingertips. Although I realize that I am speaking from privilege, in my world I have everything I need and most of what I want. I live in my own home in an active senior community; my refrigerator is fully stocked; I have a bed to sleep in; my home has heating and air conditioning; I have friends and a meaningful volunteer life; I am healthy and strong; I can get everything I need at the grocery store, or from Amazon: I don’t have to fight daily for my survival.

In this modern state, the pleasure centers of the brain keep me flooded with feel good hits. However, it takes more and more of those feel-good hits to make a difference, to fill me with joy. Living in a modern society, I have become desensitized to the things that would have made previous generations giddy with pleasure. Most of the time a stocked refrigerator is taken for granted, not spoken of in gratitude. So for me, gratitude becomes an essential part of feeling joy.

This morning I was grateful for the soft breeze that kept me cool; for the moonlight and a sky full of stars; for living in a place where I could walk safely in the dark; for the beautiful animal who walked beside me; for the deer and other creatures who make their homes in our neighborhood; for the ability to walk two miles at my age without pain; for the healthy husband I came home to; for clean, running water and the ability to heat that water for my tea; for the food in my pantry and my refrigerator; for a refrigerator; for having a bed to make, for a vacuum cleaner; for a home to clean; for clothes to wash and machines to wash them and dry them; for a computer and a phone; for my own space in which to work – and all these were things I thought about before six AM.

I have listed these things because they are things I usually take for granted. They are so mundane, so ubiquitous in my life that I don’t see or think about them. They just are. However, when I begin to list each thing, I begin to see how fortunate I am – especially when I realize that this list is just the tip of the iceberg of things for which I can be grateful.

Oprah Winfrey said, “Being grateful all the time isn’t easy. But it’s when you least feel thankful that you are most in need of what gratitude can give you: perspective. Gratitude can transform any situation. It alters your vibration, moving you from negative energy to positive. It’s the quickest, easiest most powerful way to effect change in your life — this I know for sure.”

If you are caught up in that feeling of blah, I challenge you to join me in thinking of the mundane things for which you are grateful. I challenge you to program your brain to really see your everyday world as a source of gratitude-inducing things and experiences, not just the things you take for granted. How many things can you be grateful for before you start your day?

Barbara Garland
July, 2023