Giving thanks during a pandemic: ‘We learn to appreciate things when we lose them’
Joni Mitchell has written a lot of great lyrics, but one line seems especially apt this Thanksgiving.
In “Big Yellow Taxi,” the singer/songwriter’s jaunty 1970 tune about loss – of trees, of healthy food, of a love interest – she repeats and repeats, “Don’t it always seem to go / That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”
Mitchell is challenging us to not take things for granted. There is a wildly simple way to do that. It’s called expressing gratitude.
Sure, that may sound eye-rollingly New Agey. But in truth, there has never been a better time to be genuinely thankful than this holiday season, one that arrives in the throes of a wrenching two-year global pandemic. In fact, we as a society are uniquely poised to feel profound gratitude because of our tough times.
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If any parallel is apt, it is to those who grappled with the Great Depression. That generation faced a decadelong hardship so profound that it forged a lasting appreciation for the value of hard work and simple pleasures, both enshrined by the mythic paintings of Norman Rockwell.
“COVID-19 was all about death,” says Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley. “This recovery is about a renewed feeling of survival, a gratefulness for backyard barbecues, religious services, or listening to live music. It’s a time of gratitude.”
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The cautionary word, however, is that humans are prone to what’s called hedonic adaptation, which basically translates to a tendency to revert back to our old – and in this case, unappreciative – ways.
“We are very good at getting used to changes, good and bad, which is what adaptation is, so in that sense, gratitude is the antidote to adaptation,” says Sonja Lyubomirsky, psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, and author of “The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want.”
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Celebrities haven’t been shy about the power of gratitude in their lives.
Oprah Winfrey is among a bevy of stars who kept a gratitude journal, nothing more complicated than noting what you give thanks for daily.
“I practice being grateful,” Winfrey told the 2017 graduates of Skidmore College. “And a lot of people say, ‘Oh, Oprah, that’s easy for you because you’ve got everything!’ (But) I’ve got everything because I practiced being grateful.”
In 2018, Lin-Manuel Miranda simply tweeted: “Gmorning with gratitude to the books, movies, plays, and music you love the most, and how they helped you figure out what you love what you’re doing and who you are in your time here, it’s your time after all.”
In that same pre-pandemic year, actress Kerry Washington tweeted, “Today I choose: gratitude. It will probably look feel like many different kinds of emotions but I want to keep my gratitude in first place.”
In 2020, during the height of the unfolding pandemic, Yoko Ono tweeted: “I give thanks every day how wonderful it is to be still breathing. And you should, too.”
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That simple act of appreciation came easily in the difficult 1930s when 1 in 4 Americans was unemployed and 1 in 5 – some 20 million people – survived on food stamps.
“The Depression forced people to reevaluate their priorities,” says Stephen Mihm, history professor at the University of Georgia, who notes that people started to appreciate simple and inexpensive pastimes such as bridge and bird-watching.
“Something similar is happening now, where just the act of sitting outside with friends takes on new meaning,” he says.
Part of this awakening stems from the fact that the past seven decades have been filled with almost steady economic growth and no Depression-like cataclysms. This created a false sense that things would always be this way. In truth, over the centuries such a smooth sail is more exception than the rule.
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For many, COVID-19 has challenged our ability to be grateful
To be sure, nearly two years into this health crisis, there has been incalculable loss and suffering, punctuated by the deaths of 770,000 Americans. Nearly 1 in 7 of us, or approaching 50 million people, have contracted the virus, which hasn’t affected some but in others has left debilitating complications that can make life miserable.
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One suggestion is to start at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Instead of launching into the usual superficial chatter, be bold enough to really connect and share what you are thankful for, says Kristi Nelson, executive director of A Network for Grateful Living and author of “Wake Up Grateful: The Transformative Practice of Taking Nothing for Granted.”
“Let’s change our rituals and deepen the way we gather because we’ve seen up close how fragile life is,” says Nelson, whose own views came into focus after surviving Stage 4 cancer. “There’s no better way to honor those people we’ve lost to the pandemic than to ask ourselves: How would they live if they could come back for one day? Can we learn from that, and start living that way now?”
One of her favorite suggestions for those in search of guidance is a practice, featured on her organization’s site, called “From Obligation to Opportunity.”
You write down five things from your to-do list, such as paying bills or washing dishes, leading off with the heading: “I have to.”
“Then you write the same list, but start with ‘I get to,’ ” says Nelson. “Watch how your attitude and energy shifts when you see responsibilities and obligations as privileges and opportunities.”
People do seem to be in search of such guidance. During the pandemic-driven lockdowns, Georgian Benta saw interest in his five-year-old The Gratitude Podcast leap. It is currently among the top 1% of podcasts globally, according to Listen Score.
Benta, who has recorded hundreds of episodes from his home in the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca, was aiming to “bring a new perspective on gratitude to Westerners from a country that many people are fleeing from,” he says. “The point is you can find gratitude wherever you are.”
After interviewing 200-plus guests, ranging from 9/11 survivors to monks, Benta says he has detected a common theme.
“Often, it’s people discovering gratitude after they lost something valuable for them: a business, a job, a loved one,” he says. “We learn to appreciate things when we lose them, unfortunately.”
OK, so Joni Mitchell said it more lyrically, but you get the point. The time to be grateful is now. So grab it, along with that turkey leg.
Happy Thanksgiving.
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