How To Feel Grateful (Even When You Really Don’t Want To)

Hint: Let the world be alive

Photo: Tara Moore/Getty Images

Here’s a list of the ways I am loved:

1. The couch loves me by holding me up.
2. My car loves me by telling me when it needs oil and gas.
3. My body loves me by alarming me when I need to get more sleep or eat less salt.
4. A zucchini loves me by climbing out of the ground, getting in a box, and coming to my house, where it also loves me by waiting in the refrigerator while I try to figure out what to do with it.
5. My cats love me by gifting me with dead mice and using their purrs to vibrate my pillow.
6. The world loves my novel by reading it, and by not reading it, too.
7. The plants love me by agreeing to be half of my breathing.
8. The rain loves me by falling on my house and also falling on the hillside full of vines.
9. My sweetheart loves me by being proud of me, disappointed in me (sometimes), and also by rubbing my feet (always).
10. The headphones love me by singing to me, just me and nobody else.

These are just a few ways that I’m loved by the things around me. By no means do I think that these efforts are the sole aims of rain, zucchini, or my cats — they do not have to do these things, and they are not for doing these things, but they do anyway, and that is love.

Sometimes I think this way when I feel distressed, small, and annoyed; put-upon, fearful, and self-pitying; angry, unloved, you name it. I like to make a list, and I start by looking around at everything I can see and wondering: How does it show its love? This bicycle, this lamp, this cup of decaf coffee? I answer the question over and over again, looking at everything in the room, and I realize that I am surrounded by love. Before I felt alone, and was probably grasping for a strategy to fix this state by conniving approval out of someone. And now I realize that I am in the care of so many beings, it’s hard to keep feeling like a sourpuss.

In my experience, gratitude is difficult to arrive at when it’s something I’m “supposed” to feel. And usually, when you’re feeling bad, some unhelpful person will come…