Even though, in many ways, Thanksgiving might be one of the more morally debatable holidays (decades of violence whitewashed over by a happy feast anyone?) in its origin, it is still one of my all time favorite holidays.
And it’s not just the food – even though – OMG FOOD, it is that anyone can celebrate it. Are you Christian? Great – celebrate Thanksgiving. Buddhist? Woot woot – join on in. Are you a recent immigrant? Grab a fork dude. Vegan? Make yourself some mad hummus and magic things made with agave (things I should probably learn how to make) and come to the table. Want to celebrate Thanksgiving with a turkey and all the trimmings – yes please. Want to celebrate it with 10 pizzas from Papa Johns, go ahead. All you need is a bit of (or a lot of) food, and hopefully some friends and family, and a grateful heart and there you have Thanksgiving.
See to me, Thanksgiving is about being grateful. And it’s hard to be grateful sometimes. It’s really hard to be grateful when you are angry, or sick, or you’ve having money trouble, or things are just going so so wrong. Sometimes things are going so badly, you might feel for a moment that there is nothing even to be grateful for. Add all that to mankind’s amazingly horrible negativity bias and sometimes gratitude is one of the hardest things out there.
What is negativity bias?
You can read extensively about this on google and so forth, but for the purposes of this little article – considering the following two scenarios:
Scenario A: You go to a new pizzeria in town – and it has amazing pizza. You’re there with your friends and it is just a lovely evening. Great service, great food. You think for a minute, ‘I should really write them a kick-ass review, because this pizza is the shizz’ but then you realize you don’t have a Yelp account and then it’s a lot of work to get one – and maybe you’ll just like them on facebook and comment about the pizza but then – meh – you’re doing a million other things and you’ll just tell people about the good people if they ask you for a recommendation.
Scenario B: You go to a new pizzeria in town – and it has amazing pizza. You’re there with your friends and it is just a lovely evening. Great service, great food. But then you go in for your third piece of pizza and there is a friggin roach baked into your pizza (this actually happened to me in highschool – so gross). You dodge actually eating it but you and your friends are horrified and disgusted. Right there at the table you take a picture of it and immediately upload it to your Facebook – and you hurriedly sign up for a Yelp account so you can tell everyone to dodge this nasty pizza joint.
Sound like something that you might do?
It probably is, and that doesn’t make you a jerk – or even a bad person – it just describes the way that humans will pay more attention and remember a bad experience more than they will a good one. There is probably some wonderful Darwinian reason for this (avoiding the plant that killed great uncle Moe) but if we let our negativity bias overrun our lives, the effects can be ruinous.
Negativity is a killer
Have you ever been around a truly negative person? It’s kind of brutal. Everything feels wrong. The parking was awful, the popcorn at the theater didn’t have enough butter, that movie looks so lame, why don’t they just skip right to the actual film? And so forth and so on until you stop even wanting to be there.
Ever felt, yourself, like everything was going wrong? Ever notice how after awhile you feel like you’re moving through sludge and there is no way forward or no solution? Being totally candid – I sure have. I have a lot. And most of the time it’s because things have been actually wrong, but you still have to find a way to move forward and that’s where avoiding the negativity is crucial.
So what does gratitude even do for you?
My third year of law school – right before graduation – I felt like the bottom was falling out. I was a single mom at the time. I had to write a 10,000 page paper in about 10 days (that one was a lot my fault), my engagement had been called off, I had financial issues and had to get more loans, and the icing on the cake was that I found out my former landlords were suing me for breaking my lease (I left my rental house after 2.5 years of them not fixing an incredible mouse infestation, having broken heating, part of the ceiling fell in, it was a mess), and I had no job lined up post graduation. I literally had no idea how I was even going make it through graduation – assuming I managed to graduate. And that’s when I started practicing gratitude. I saw there crying in my room while my daughter was asleep and tried to make a list of everything I was grateful for. Like a smart ass I started with ‘I don’t live in the middle ages’. But then it occurred to me that that’s actually a pretty valid thing to be grateful for. I added my health and that of my daughter – and I realized that many people struggle with health daily. I was worried about what was going to happen after graduation and realized I was grateful for my mom and that I had family who would take me in and let me get on my feet. And the list went on – some were serious, some were snarky, but all were true. And when I finished, I felt better. I hadn’t solved my problems but I was in a mindset to buckle down and push forward. There have been so many times in my life where gratitude made me stronger.
Gratitude also makes you a better person. It’s hard to be a good friend, a good partner, or a good parent when you can’t see all the good you have in your life. If you have kids and all you think about is how you used to be able to sleep in on a Saturday or go somewhere without it taking an hour to get out the door – then you might be missing out on all the wonderful moments that are happening (please note I’m saying always thinking – we all think those thoughts sometimes, especially when you’re trying to put shoes on an angry half naked toddler who’s trying to pull his diaper off… not that that happens in my house). If you spend all day thinking of the job you don’t have or the clothes you don’t have or the house you don’t have – you might be missing out on all the great things you do have.
And gratitude makes you kinder. When you appreciate all the goodness if your life, I think it helps make you more compassionate and less bitter.
And so this has to do with Thanksgiving?
Even though Thanksgiving is often disregarded as that poor sad orphan holiday that exists between two holiday giants, it’s a great time to devote yourself to gratitude. Take each day this month and be thankful. Post it on facebook – write it in a book – but do it actively. I’ll be posting every day because it reminds me of all the great things in my life. Sometimes they’re silly and sometimes they’re serious. Feel free to share my posts if you want – or write your own. But do your own #30daysofthankful – bet you feel better at the end of it.
Mama on Java 