Kyle's Files: The Thanksgiving Edition
Kyle's Files: The Thanksgiving Edition
Types of Gratitude, Paths to Gratitude, Gratitude and Culture, and Gratitude as Revenge?
Happy belated Thanksgiving! In this letter you’ll find helpful reminders, ways to conceive of gratitude, ways to create gratitude, and hopefully some tensions between them.
Most of the books I linked to happen to be on Amazon’s “get 3 for the price of 2” sale, so it’s a decent time to grab them (www.betterworldbooks.com also has a good sale happening.)
I’ve been enjoying the Chat feature in Substack’s app, so set up a thread for us to talk. If you’re interested in this, scroll down to the bottom for instructions. For those of you who have the Substack App set up already, you can join the conversation here. (Of course, replying is just as good as always :) )
1. Thanks’n’Things™
“We should try by all means to be as grateful as possible. For gratitude is a good thing for ourselves, in a sense in which justice, that is commonly supposed to concern other persons, is not; gratitude returns in large measure unto itself.” Seneca, in a letter to Lucius
"If true wealth consists in worriless sleeping, clear conscience, reciprocal gratitude, absence of envy, good appetite, muscle strength, physical energy, frequent laughs, no meals alone, no gym class, some physical labor (or hobby), good bowel movements, no meeting rooms, and periodic surprises, then it is largely subtractive." Nassim Taleb, Antifragile
“All you need are these: certainty of judgment in the present moment; action for the common good in the present moment; and an attitude of gratitude in the present moment for anything that comes your way.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“That which is so astonishing in the religious life of the ancient Greeks is the irrestrainable stream of GRATITUDE which it pours forth—it is a very superior kind of man who takes SUCH an attitude towards nature and life.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil
“There are no words with which to express my gratitude at having been given this one chance to live—if not Live.” Sheila Heti, How to Be
“Doing things out of obligation leads to resentment. Feeling resentment leads to entitlement. And living in entitlement makes you a shitty person. Instead, do things out of CHOICE. That will lead to gratitude, and gratitude leads to generosity. And generous people are the best.” Victor Saad, 34 Lessons
“If you hold a healthy awareness of your own mortality, your eyes will be opened to the grandeur and glory of life, and that will evoke all of the virtues I’ve named, as well as those I haven’t, such as hope, generosity, and gratitude. If the unexamined life is not worth living, it’s equally true that the unlived life is not worth examining.” Palmer J Parker, 6 Pillars of the Wholehearted Life Commencement Address (via The Marginalian)
“To argue proofs of religion is to miss the point of religion. What matters is if one’s sense of gratitude and wonder are fitting responses to our world. The earth contains its own genius, its own incomprehensible moods and states that work upon us, but we are trained into a disembodied form of interior life that leads us to believe these moods are ours, springing organically from inside of us. Yet the gods linger to remind us that the genius of the world does not originate within ourselves, but is hidden in every part of the world, if we are willing to let it dawn on us.” Simon Sarris, In Praise of the Gods
“No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night. We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them.” Elie Wiesel, From the Kingdom of Memory
“I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude.” Oliver Sachs, on learning of his cancer diagnosis (NYT)
“As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
2. Gratitude In Presence
David Whyte’s shockingly beautiful Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words provides a perfect starting point for talking about gratitude—a different, more active understanding:
Gratitude is not a passive response to something we have been given; gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event; it is the deep, a priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.
Whyte continues:
Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness. We sit at the table as part of every other person's world while making our own world without will or effort; this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege. Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets all other presences. Being unappreciative might mean we are simply not paying attention.
“Generosity of presence,” may be my favorite phrase in this letter. It is likely a perfect description of the best people in your life.
Many years earlier, in Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity, he wrote about how gratitude, regularly practiced, can prepare us to handle adversity with a lighter touch:
A lightness and lightness that gives us a sense of ease, movement and potential may bring things that have always been a struggle to us more easily, and scare us to death in the process. It may be that we felt that lightness years ago but failed in what we wanted and now the return of that possibility can be just too overwhelming. I have often thought that spending a few moments a day practicing the art of happiness, of gratefulness, of celebration and arrival, of victory in tiny but important things would go a long way toward preparing us for those grander, more lifelong goals for which we are often unprepared.
3. Seneca, The Stoic Evolution of Gratitude, And Rituals
Curie Virág discusses how Seneca improved gratitude as it was known in ancient Greece in “Rituals create community by translating love into action”:
In ancient Greece, as David Konstan observed in his book In the Orbit of Love (2018), the very idea of gratitude was fraught with tensions arising from its entanglements with material transactions, and where one drew the line between expressing genuine feelings of gratitude and simply offering payback for a benefit received was not always straightforward. As this messy and awkward state of affairs continued to unfold, Seneca offered a solution: proposing a conceptual distinction between feeling gratitude and gratitude as payment for a debt owed, he claimed that it was, in fact, possible to be ‘grateful empty-handed’. In so doing, presumably, he liberated gratitude from the sordid business of give-and-take, ushering in the modern notion of gratitude as a sentiment.
In the letters he wrote to his student, Seneca included this bit about gratitude as a pleasant experience in itself, which might hint at how he was able to help ancient Grecians disentangle gratitude and stuff:
I am grateful, not in order that my neighbour, provoked by the earlier act of kindness, may be more ready to benefit me, but simply in order that I may perform a most pleasant and beautiful act; I feel grateful, not because it profits me, but because it pleases me.
This self-reinforcing feeling of gratitude makes it easier for him to suggest that:
In order to discover one grateful person, it is worthwhile to make trial of many ungrateful ones.
Returning to the ritual piece, Virág points out that feelings like love and gratitude are “possibilities for action” rather than just feelings in response to events, something David Whyte would seem to agree with. Rituals can encourage these actions to take place:
As ritual, then, the expressions of our love become more than the afterthoughts of our sentiments: in furnishing the stage for this love to be realised, it becomes the very template for ordering our existence and for the dignified and patterned fulfilment of that which is most human in us.
Rituals help shape our lives to make the invisible visible, drawing our attention and energy to things like gratitude, which can so easily be forgotten.
3. Gratitude As Transformational Labor (And Moral Memory)
The essence of all beautiful art, all great art belongs here: the essence of both is gratitude. - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols
A few letters ago, we looked at Lewis Hyde’s A Primer For Forgetting (archived letter). In his previous book, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, he conceived of gratitude as the labor we undertake when a gift allows for our transformation. To understand this definition of gratitude we should remember its focus on transformational gifts, which change us deeply (and, usually is freely given: many works of art, music, Alcoholics Anonymous, Buddha’s teachings, God’s Grace, a life-changing grant or opportunity, an entrepreneur inspiring others by showing proof of some new possibility, etc).
We come to painting, to poetry, to the stage, hoping to revive the soul. And any artist whose work touches us earns our gratitude.
There is some tension here with other ideas of gratitude because of this focus. I think it can be uniquely powerful, though, with its focus on creativity:
I would like to speak of gratitude as a labor undertaken by the soul to effect the transformation after a gift has been received. Between the time a gift comes to us and the time we pass it along, we suffer gratitude. Moreover, with gifts that are agents of change, it is only when the gift has worked in us, only when we have come up to its level, as it were, that we can give it away again. Passing the gift along is the act of gratitude that finishes the labor. The transformation is not accomplished until we have the power to give the gift on our own terms. Therefore, the end of the labor of gratitude is similarity with the gift or with its donor. Once this similarity has been achieved we may feel a lingering and generalized gratitude, but we won't feel it with the urgency of true indebtedness.
Hyde suggests that many fairytales illustrate this pattern for us. In the tale of The Elves and the Shoemaker, the shoemaker’s transformation is complete when he expresses his gratitude to the elves by making them shoes (the exact thing they’d been doing for him).
Hyde spends some time talking about gifts and the marketplace, something that I hope to explore more fully in a future later. Here I’d like to look at one way in which gratitude can be poisoned:
Contracts of the heart lie outside the law, and the circle of gift is narrowed, therefore, whenever contracts are converted to legal relationships.
The ability for civilizations to organize depends on all sorts of agreements, which can’t all close out successfully, so we’ve introduced ways of returning to a clean slate when the burden of debt becomes too heavy. One way:
The burning of written debt instruments is a move to preserve the ambiguity and inexactness that makes gift exchange social. Seen in this way, their destruction is not an antisocial act. It is a move to free gratitude as a spiritual feeling and social binder. If gratitude is as Georg Simmel once put it, “the moral memory of mankind,” then it is a move to refreshen that memory which grows dull whenever our debts are transformed into obligations and servitudes, whenever the palpable and embodied unions of the heart—entered into out of desire, preserved in gratitude, and quit at will—are replaced by an invisible government of merely statutory connections.
This “ambiguity and inexactness” is something we personally try to preserve every year during holiday gift shopping. The dangers of clumsy gift-giving creating “obligations and servitudes” are probably what drive some to opt out of holiday gift-giving altogether. We see this grappling with the tension between fairness and “ambiguity and inexactness” in all sorts of social situations beyond explicit gift-giving: helping neighbors, splitting meals out, referrals, and doing favors in general.
Observations like those Hyde makes above just kind amazes me how many vital-but-incredibly-hard-to-articulate pieces of human social life exist. It gives me pause when I look at many of the absolutely weird things happening around us.
4. Grateful Mindfulness, Giving Zen Thanks
One of my favorite things about Joseph Goldstein’s Mindfulness is how much emphasized the role of actively creating positive mind states in Buddhist teachings. Here he suggests gratitude as tool for making forgiveness possible:
By focusing on the good in ourselves and others and feeling gratitude for the good others have done for us, we can more easily open to a place of forgiveness, not holding on to old grudges and hurts.
He also suggests a more difficult practice:
Notice the next time you’re having difficulty with a person or with a certain situation. Can you genuinely feel grateful to him or it for the opportunity to practice patience?
In Stop Fixing Yourself, Anthony de Mello describes his method of creating that kind of gratitude:
It is inconceivable that anyone could be grateful and unhappy. I thank the Lord for each event of yesterday and notice the effect this has on me. And the things I call unpleasant, undesirable —I search for the good that comes from these… the seeds for growth they carry… and find reason to be grateful for them, too. Finally I see myself moving through each portion of today in gratitude —and happiness.
In True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart, Thich Nhat Hahn provides a more thorough version of the seed metaphor and how meditation can help bring some level of gratitude to the shit in our lives:
There are always waste materials and flowers in us. The gardener who is familiar with organic gardening is constantly on the alert to save the waste materials because he knows how to transform them into compost and then transform that compost into flowers and vegetables. So be grateful for your pains, be grateful for suffering—you will need them. We have to learn the art of transforming compost into flowers. Look at a flower: it is beautiful, it is fragrant, it is pure; but if you look deeply you can already see the compost in the flower. With meditation, you can see that already. If you do not meditate, you will have to wait ten days to be able to see that. If you look deeply at the garbage heap with the eye of a meditator, you can see lettuce, tomatoes, and flowers. That is exactly what the gardener sees when he looks at the garbage heap, and that is why he does not throw away his waste materials. A little bit of practice is all you need to be able to transform the garbage heap into compost and the compost into flowers.
Finally, in Henry Shukman’s memoir, One Blade of Grass, he shares a letter that he wrote to his teacher after experiencing sustained mental clarity after many years of Zen practice and many more of suffering. This is the type of letter we’ll be lucky to be able to write once in our lives, if not more:
The world has turned back to front, inside out, upside down. Things I had thought bad are not bad, and things I’d thought good aren’t good either. I realize I have never known people I’ve known for years. I long to sit long hours while the thing that has been born grows stronger. I am fully awake yet don’t know who I am. A fuse has blown, there is only silence. I feel so grateful to my parents for giving me this life. I’m overwhelmed with gratitude to Clare and the boys. And to you and Joan. I see how much of this life I have lived to gratify “Henry.” It makes no sense at all, and never did. A long childhood has finally ended, and a new one has begun. Thank you, thank you.
5. A Stoic Way To Gratitude: Deprivation, Real and Imagined
In The Stoic Challenge, William Irvine, the modern Stoic author, follows the very Stoic tradition of using some imagined loss to create more gratitude for the present:
Imagine that you are not just color-blind but blind, period. Imagine that you live in a world of darkness, in which you never see a rose or the face of a loved one. Or instead of simply imagining it, why not live it for a while? As an extension of this exercise, close your eyes and see how long you can keep them closed. When you open them again, you will likely feel a rush of gratitude.
In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson, not a modern Stoic author, describes how real deprivation can work even better:
I was beginning to appreciate that the central feature of life on the Appalachian Trail is deprivation, that the whole point of the experience is to remove yourself so thoroughly from the conveniences of everyday life that the most ordinary things—processed cheese, a can of pop gorgeously beaded with condensation—fill you with wonder and gratitude. It is an intoxicating experience to taste Coca-Cola as if for the first time and to be conveyed to the very brink of orgasm by white bread. Makes all the discomfort worthwhile, if you ask me.
6. Nietzsche on Ultimate Gratitude & Gratitude As Revenge
As I was putting this letter together I kept thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of amor fati as perfect gratitude. Nietzsche calls amor fati his “formula for human greatness” and describes it this way:
that one wants to have nothing different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear the necessary, still less to conceal it. . . . but to love it.
To love one’s fate is to not only accept, but to feel grateful for every element of every moment of our lives. This is only possible with something like a gratitude David Whyte described at the top of this letter:
[an] a priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.
This is already way too long to go into this more, but if you want to read further, I wrote about amor fati and eternal return when talking about one of my favorite New Year’s goals ever.
This final bit by Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human calls gratitude a “milder form of revenge” and portrays it as a productive cultural mechanism that it’s important to incentivize:
Gratitude and revenge. - The reason the man of power is grateful is this. His benefactor has, through the help he has given him, as it were laid hands on the sphere of the man of power and intruded into it: now, by way of requital, the man of power in turn lays hands on the sphere of his benefactor through the act of gratitude. It is a milder form of revenge. If he did not have the compensation of gratitude, the man of power would have appeared unpowerful and thenceforth counted as such. That is why every community of the good, that is to say originally the powerful, places gratitude among its first duties. Swift suggested that men are grateful in the same degree as they are revengeful.
I’m grateful to have so many strange lines to chew on.
7. Miscellany
Huberman Lab’s episode on play does a great job selling even the most serious listener on the benefits of being more playful more often in more scenarios.
Send a thank you note. “According to a new study out of the Booth Business School at the University of Chicago, researchers say that although most people find the practice of writing a thank-you to be awkward (more on that in a bit), the people who receive them are far more appreciative than the note-maker might ever have thought.” (WEF)
Marcel The Shell With Shoes On is a heartwarming mockumentary about community.
Memoria was an experience to watch. Tyler Cowen thinks this movie is one of the best of the year and “will cement Weerasethakul’s [director] reputation as the most important director of our time.” He also thinks it “concerns how the revelation of Buddhist Enlightenment might begin to spread through the world.”
Andor has been really fun to watch. I had this vague sense of it being gritty and somehow feeling like the original movies in some way. Thomas Flight describes a few techniques that help make the world feel real, like opening on detail shots of physical things rather than epic CG vistas.
Bon Iver performs “Heavenly Father” at Sydney Opera House
Marc Andreesen tweeted a brilliant image layering blue/red/black/white pills onto the hero’s journey:
As always, thank you for reading, I’m honored to have a spot in your inbox. If you’ve been enjoying these, please share them with someone else who might enjoy them, too. If this letter sparked any thoughts or gave you a bone to pick, let’s talk about it in the Substack App Chat.
-Kyle
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