The Grateful Perspective: An Optometrist for Your Heart

One of the many great sources of happiness is to get a glimpse, here and there, of a new aspect of the incredible world we live in and our incredible role in it.

Karl Popper

In this age of binary thinking, the desire to gather knowledge has become less valued than the quest to be — or appear to be — right. When this is true, we are forgoing both the enjoyment and enrichment that accompany learning and evolving. Rather than harvesting the fullness of life, we become narrow, stuck in our own muck, and grow increasingly short-sighted. How we perceive affects every aspect of how we live and how we are perceived by others. The stingy man, whose stinginess is born from the fear of losing it all, is seldom known as generous even if generosity exists inside of him.

We gain perspective when we look at a situation with openness rather than bias or foregone conclusions. This is true when we are willing to be challenged and it is especially true when we are willing to be wrong. As a false emphasis on being right persists throughout our culture and in how we communicate, we risk being wrong in all the terrible ways. There is, after all, a stark difference between being ignorant and being certain. Ignorance is overcome by knowledge and a wider perspective. Certainty is like constructing a dome over yourself — nothing comes in and not much good gets out. 

The profound and revelatory beauty of living gratefully is that it penetrates the illusion of certainty and selfhood (ego). It forces you to look in unexpected places with an unexpected curiosity. Take for example, Scott G., a member of the Grateful Living community. He says that, “gratefulness is what keeps me grounded and from losing hope because of my diagnosis with Alzheimer’s. Gratefulness brings joy into my life.” A disease as awful as Alzheimer’s can be endured differently with a grateful perspective. While it is unlikely that anyone is grateful for a disease, it is likely that living gratefully in times of joy and difficulty will reveal an abundance of things for which we can give thanks. This is the result of nonbinary thinking and perceiving. Nonbinary thinking is the science of gratefulness, where knowledge is acquired about yourself and life. In the absence of certainty we recognize possibility and, more importantly, the power of doubt. 

In her book Twelve Steps to A Compassionate Life, Karen Armstrong writes that doubt releases us from the prison of selfhood. Armstrong says such an experience of release has three steps:

1. Recognize and appreciate the unknown and the unknowable.
2. Become sensitive to overconfident assertions of certainty in ourselves and other people.
3. Make ourselves aware of the numinous mystery of each human being we encounter during the day.

Doubt allows us to question what we’ve accepted as certain or complete. It emboldens us to challenge lowercase “t” truths so that we might move closer to the “Truth.” Questioning life with a curious heart enhances and deepens our perspective. As we become less certain we also become less rigid. This is life’s playground, where the stature of things we may have once overlooked or dismissed becomes incomprehensible, even magnificent. Here is where we are granted the opportunity for our perspective to become transcendent rather than mundane and predictable, hindered by the illusion that we can articulate the ineffable and, worse, be right about it. 

A grateful perspective has the courage to confidently say I don’t know because it understands that it is precisely in the unknowing that we perceive more clearly.

Photo by Claudio Schwarz

Joe Primo, Grateful Living

Joe Primo is the CEO of Grateful Living. He is a passionate speaker and community-builder whose accomplishments made him a leading voice on resilience and adversity. Gratefulness for life, he believes, is foundational to discovering meaning and the only response that is big enough and appropriate for the plot twists, delights, surprises, and devastation we encounter along the way. A student of our founder since his studies at Yale Divinity School, Joe is committed to advancing our global movement and making the transformational practice of grateful living both accessible to all and integral to communities and places of belonging. His TED talk, “Grief is Good,” reframed the grief paradigm as a responsive resource. He is the author of “What Do We Tell the Children? Talking to Kids About Death and Dying” and numerous articles.

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