Last week I sustained a remote-work injury. In the process of pushing back from my desk in my home office, I got tangled up in the computer cords, which sent my laptop crashing down on my foot. The sharp corner of the MacBook landed on the tendons below my right ankle bone. Nothing broke, but I couldn’t walk normally for a couple of days. Boots and stairs were tough, and I had to forego my daily exercise.
As I hobbled around, I lamented my former functionality. How could I have taken my feet for granted? I thought, self-scolding. I promised myself: If and when I walk again, I’m going to treat these old dogs with the respect they deserve.
Among the paradoxes of human existence is the blind spot that prevents us from seeing, much less counting, our blessings. The drive to survive makes us good at facing adversity, and even overcoming and adapting to it, but not so much at appreciating what’s going right. As singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell put it: “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.”
The host of the NPR show and podcast “Hidden Brain” has noticed this tendency, too. In a recent episode, Shankar Vedantam asks, “Why is it, even when our lives are objectively better than the lives of most people who ever lived, we are all prone to seeing the clouds, not the silver lining? … We notice small delays at the airport but ignore the miracle that we can literally fly across the world. We take our health for granted and only notice the gifts of our limbs and our senses when they are taken away from us. We zero in on annoyances in personal relationships and rarely pause to acknowledge what is wonderful about our friends, families and coworkers.
“Our ungratitude for our good fortune is so automatic and ubiquitous that it seems obvious there must be an underlying psychology to it.”
There is, indeed. After positing that “gratitude is a powerful driver of human well-being,” the show delves into all the ways we manage to avoid feeling it. Vedantam’s guest, Cornell University psychologist Tom Gilovich, covers everything from envy and myopia to the “hedonic treadmill” and why Olympic bronze medalists often look happier than the ones who win silver. I’ve listened to the show twice and plan to again on the three-hour drive to Thanksgiving festivities in Massachusetts.
Not surprisingly, one of the antidotes for the absence of gratitude is active, regular expressions of it. So here goes: I am grateful to live in a beautiful and safe place, where people still try to care for one another. I am thankful to have a sense of purpose: to be able to put out this newspaper — hard as it is — with a team of dedicated colleagues who are no less devoted to its excellence, and to have the support of the loyal advertisers and Super Readers who pay to sustain it. I appreciate the patience of my friends and partner.
And I’m really happy I can walk again.
This article appears in Nov 22-28, 2023.
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