Practice: The Essential Ingredient for a Grateful Life

Practice helps us build our gratitude muscle.

Dr. Joel Wong

I am putting in a large vegetable garden this year. I am jittery with excitement to get my hands in the soil and to taste all the flavors of my harvest, which are seemingly lacking in anything I can buy from an American grocery store. Before I can play in the dirt, I have three very tall challenges: oak trees. Living in the forest is wonderful except for the lack of ample sunlight that is needed to grow things. So I thanked my oaks for making space for my crops and enlisted some help to remove them because I do not cut large trees.

As I watched three guys climb fearlessly and attach ropes in order to delicately take down the trees without damaging others, I was in awe. Like Cirque du Soleil performers, they climbed and dangled from branches with grace, gliding with ease as if it was no big deal. When they completed the job I asked how they approach danger with so much confidence. “We do this every day,” they said. In other words, they have lots and lots of practice.

This reminded me of when I was a kid. I come from a family of musicians so I was required to learn the piano growing up. My mom would make me sit at the piano for 45 minutes every night. She set a timer. If I stopped, so did the timer. I hated it, but it gave me a skill that helped me win talent shows in high school, which made me feel like a cool kid. If I sit down to play today, you would never believe that I made enough money to pay for grad school and buy my first car with my piano playing revenue. I stopped practicing and oh, it shows.

Can you imagine an athlete winning a major competition without practice? Would you pay to see a pianist if you knew she didn’t practice the concerto on the playbill? And would you ever be so bold to climb a tree and jump to the neighboring one with a chainsaw in hand if you had no prior practice? 

Practice is what we do to accomplish our goals and sustain our purpose. Living gratefully is a practice because it is an action, a verb. It is not a belief, in which you say I believe I can be grateful today. It is not a thought, like I think I’ll practice the piano today. It is a commitment. It is a bold stance that says, I will do this!

Experiencing the grateful life begins with your commitment to it. You want to be a concert pianist? You will need practice — years and years of practice. You want to live a meaningful and joyful life that doesn’t depend on what happens, as our founder Br. David Steindl-Rast says? You will need to practice gratefulness continuously throughout your life. 

Living gratefully is a practice because it is the action we must choose to do over and over again, every day. As a way of being that enhances our perspective, it only makes sense that living gratefully requires us to practice it daily. Life gives us so many experiences that require protective gear, which is to say equipment that helps us safely accomplish the task before us, to wake up to life and live it more fully. 

Practice, as we know from athletes and musicians, requires rituals and routines, drills and scrimmages. Sometimes we practice solo and sometimes with others. However we practice matters less than the fact that we are practicing. Through repetition we grow and improve, which enhances our readiness for whatever happens next.  With practice we are better prepared. As special guest Diana Butler Bass shared recently in our course, The Anatomy of Gratefulness, “Practice is where the technique begins to transform who you are, and what you are called to do in the world. Practice doesn’t make you perfect. It makes you better.”

Living gratefully is not something we aspire to one day. It is what we do. When we practice, this doing shapes who we are, who we are becoming, and the life we lead, transforming our way of being. 

Photo by Jordan Whitfield

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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