Being weak is nothing to be ashamed of.. Staying weak is - Fuegoleon Vermillion (From the Anime Black Clover)

We can’t take being grateful for granted. Gratitude presupposes conscious awareness of an aspect of the present, the ability to mentally contrast reality with a theoretical world where that aspect was altered or deprived, and appreciate the forces and circumstances beyond our control that brought that about the current state of affairs. This is an active process that requires energy and focus.

However when left to its own devices, the human mind trends toward ingratitude similarly to how physicists claim the universe is driven towards entropy. Once novel experiences become habituated and routines are moved into the subconscious; this undercuts the requisite precondition for gratitude of being consciously aware. Moreover, the mind becomes fixated on pursuing goals or devising means to bring about experiences that have not come to pass -as soon as we get a dollar, we want two more.

If our minds are left unchecked, we end up taking the circumstances we find ourselves in for granted. From there it’s easy to descend into a state of ingratitude, finding fault and feeling slighted at the most minor of turbulence in life. We are easily unmoored from recognition of the blessings we have now in the present moment and become mentally adrift into cloudy visions of an idealized future.

But let us put this struggle into context; gratitude is not a mere choice. A man who suffered and lived a life submerged in a mental fog for years or decades isn’t going to read a pop-psychology listicle recommending to the reader to ‘practice gratitude for five minutes per day’ and flip on a mental light switch flooding the darkened crevasses of his psyche with the warm glow of thankfulness.

Similarly, that man didn’t necessarily make a choice to flip a switch off and cast himself in the darkness of ingratitude. People may be born in hard conditions and exist with excessive suffering as their baseline. Parents and caregivers can model improper behaviors and then a child’s developing brain becomes entrained with their role model’s. Unhealed traumas or chronic disease may cause the mind to be unable to be present for extended periods of time. It’s hard to grateful while you’re starving, poisoned, or under duress.

So when we see advice or feel the impetus towards bringing more gratitude into our life, we shouldn’t immediately associate our current state ingratitude with shame. There’s a lot of reasons why a person may not be counting their blessings and overflowing with effusive praise for God and their fellow man.

It’s more apt to think of training gratitude like a muscle. There are concrete neural pathways that channel the thoughts and emotions associated with thanking others and being grateful that need to be exercised regularly to strengthen them and prevent atrophy. Over time we can strengthen these to increase the body’s baseline capacity to actually feel thankful, to feel grateful, to embody this state. We must desire more than to express hollow sentiments of an idealized personal character that is not actually realized in the core of our being.

Like training a muscle, some things are easy to be grateful for, other events are very difficult and only the most practiced will be able to give thanks in the face of them. Finding a $20 bill on the street or getting a bonus at work are the equivalent of a 2 1/2 pound dumbbell. Almost anyone can enter into a gym and begin lifting that weight. Being thankful for your job after a long and stressful day at work is a bit more difficult. Theoretically, one should be thankful to be able to have an income over being unemployed, but in practice it’s not easy to feel that way after an hour of verbal sparring with your boss over the technical details blocking the deployment of some new software to production. Though this is still attainable to most with training; it’s like a 35 pound dumbbell.

As the suffering increases, the weight reaches levels where only the spiritually fit can perform the requisite mental and emotional movements. It’s difficult to feel grateful for anything while caught in the throes of depression, or if your family is met with tragedy, or your nation is subject to the horrors of famine, war, and plague. It takes Olympic levels of training and discipline to feel grateful in the face of the extreme suffering and tragedies found in this world.

Therefore, it behooves us to take the moments of struggle not as a test of our character to determine if we met some arbitrary threshold on gratefulness, but as opportunities to train and grow our ability to be grateful.

If we take a moment when we’re tired, hungry, and burdened with the stresses of life to count a single blessing -even if our efforts to do so end with nothing but frustration and contempt- we performed a single rep that strengthened those neural pathways and pushed us towards thankfulness. Then the tempests of life pass and we find that we’re more naturally inclined towards seeing how much we are blessed with, even if we didn’t in that moment.

In every moment we have the choice to be grateful. As I’m drafting this article, my mind is generating thoughts about how I should be able to write more, how my prose is not clear, not vivid enough, that I’m too tired. I’m not the writer I should be. These thoughts are here, there’s no shame in them, but I also have a choice to look and say “Hey! I’ve wrote 850 words. How amazing that I have the strength and clarity to do even this, when there have been so many days I’ve struggled to even rise from my bed.”

I’ll do my best to choose the latter, and, over time, the energy I invest into these little choices will hopefully coalesce into the spiritual fruits of a grateful disposition. There’s no shame in feeling ungrateful; there is shame in choosing to stay ungrateful.