Moving Beyond Gratitude to Living Gratefully 

It’s easy to give thanks when you are pleased with what is received. But life is full of difficulties and things we are not pleased to receive. What are you to do in those many moments?

Gratitude is frequently confused with politeness because that is often what it is for many people. Saying thank you to acknowledge a kindness can quickly become habitual or meaningless, where a sense of belonging and mutual care gets lost. You may do this dozens of times a day without fully realizing it — thank you for holding the door, thank you for bringing me my meal, thank you for hosting, thank you for your call — and go about your day with a “business as usual” approach to life. Gratitude encourages us to appreciate and recognize what has been given to us by a benefactor, according to researcher Dr. Joel Wong. That makes gratitude an acknowledgement — an expression — of something you happily receive. 

Living gratefully is a commitment to observing and responding to the opportunities in every moment. When supported through daily practice, it helps us perceive what we can be grateful for, not just what we find pleasing.

Whether life is going well or it feels particularly challenging, our perspective makes a difference for how we cope, respond to life, and treat each other. 

Living gratefully is a commitment to observing and responding to the opportunities in every moment. When supported through daily practice, it helps us perceive what we can be grateful for, not just what we find pleasing. As a result, you will have an understanding — a trust — that life itself has gifts within it and you can endure challenges because the gifts continue to exist outside and within the challenge you are facing.

For those who arrive to living gratefully on their own, it is often because an adversity caused them to understand life in a new way. These are often spiritually mature people who recognize the fullness of life and all of its paradoxes. Life has made them grateful despite the pain and uncertainty and because of beauty, love, nature, and cherished relationships.

When we learn to cherish life — recognizing the interdependent web that sustains all of us — we are compelled to turn gratefulness into action.

When I was first diagnosed with Celiac Disease, I was furious. As a cultural Sicilian growing up in our family pizzeria, I lived off of pizza, pasta, and pastry. All that yummy happiness was taken from me. Years later, I am grateful for everyone who hosts me for holidays and parties in their homes because they take extra care to keep me well, and I know it is a headache. What began as a significant loss and life change became an opportunity to be grateful for all those who keep me healthy, but I had to move beyond my resentment in order to recognize this gift I encounter daily. By living gratefully, you are able to make a paradigm shift from saying thank you to the one who bestowed the thing you are pleased to have received to thankful for having received the ultimate gift: life.  

When we learn to cherish life — recognizing the interdependent web that sustains all of us — we are compelled to turn gratefulness into action. This may be uncomfortable and unpleasing at first because it will likely reveal aspects of life we’ve neglected. As society quickly changes and becomes noisier with technology and the normalization of cruelty, our shared humanity is increasingly drowned out. But we can look to living gratefully as a highly transformative response to it all. The Century Dictionary says that “gratefulness expresses the feeling and the readiness to manifest the feeling by acts.” In other words, if you’re truly grateful you’re not going to perpetuate harm because you are able to perceive beyond the benefactor and recipient relationship. You understand that we depend on each other and have a mutual responsibility to each other. This knowledge compels you to take action for what is good for everyone.

Living gratefully cultivates humility by increasing our understanding that we are worthy of the good things that happen in our lives, but not better or different because they happened to us instead of someone else.

Sure, you can shake the hand of a leader and say “thank you for what you are doing” even as they are destroying lives and doing violence if you share their cruel worldview. Not so if you’re grateful. Living gratefully cultivates humility by increasing our understanding that we are worthy of the good things that happen in our lives, but not better or different because they happened to us instead of someone else. This daily practice is generative and life giving. It is a not a response that is dependent on what a benefactor is giving to us. Rather, living gratefully shows us the ways in which we are held and supported by the very thing that gives us life — an ecosystem of mystery, interdependence, beauty, relationships, earth, collaboration, and love. 

When William Shatner returned from space in 2022, he said his trip “ reinforced tenfold my own view on the power of our beautiful, mysterious collective human entanglement…In this insignificance we share, we have one gift that other species perhaps do not: we are aware—not only of our insignificance, but the grandeur around us that makes us insignificant. That allows us perhaps a chance to rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us. If we seize that chance.”

We do not need to go to space to recognize our human entanglement, as Shatner says. With practice we can see it every day and rededicate ourselves to it. What is an experience in your life that has awakened you to this awareness and how can it continue to ground you? This experience, if you can name it or open yourself up to a new one, may be the very compass you need to move from gratitude to living gratefully.

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi

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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