This morning I woke feeling grateful. Not for anything in particular but for a state of gratefulness itself. It felt like joy. I was grateful for the gratefulness, and grateful that I could feel grateful for gratefulness. A happy feedback loop, if there is such a thing, and one in which I was content to linger.
St. Paul urged, “Rejoice in the Lord always! Again I say rejoice!” A songster turned it into a little chorus with a jaunty melody that we sang with our children when they were young—a three-chord ditty and one of the first I learned to strum on the guitar.
So, I awoke in a state of gratefulness that felt very much like joy. But would it last? The Psalmist said sorrow may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning. From experience the reverse is also true, sorrow has always followed joy. Que sera sera. Yet, as I pondered this unbidden but welcome feeling, I wondered whether, when joy fades, I might still remain grateful—gratefulness not as sentiment but as an act of will. Can I choose to be grateful?
Epictetus in the Enchiridion reminds us that some things lie within our control and others do not. “Within our power are opinion, movement toward a thing, desire, aversion—in a word, whatever are our own acts.” Everything else lies beyond. Gratitude, I suspect, belongs within that circle of freedom. It is something we can choose.
And if it can be chosen, perhaps it can be practiced. William James suggested that feelings often follow actions rather than cause them. If I act as though I am grateful—saying thank you, noticing the ordinary blessings of the day—my inner state may begin to align with the outward act. Habit can form emotion.
Aristotle would have understood this. For him, virtue was not a sudden insight but the result of practice. We become kind by doing kind acts, courageous by acting courageously, grateful by giving thanks. The feeling grows from the repetition of the deed. Gratitude, then, is not merely a passing mood but a cultivated disposition—a habit of the heart.
Viktor Frankl, reflecting on life in the concentration camps, spoke of the one freedom that cannot be taken away: the freedom to choose one’s attitude. Gratitude, in this sense, is an existential orientation, a deliberate stance toward life even when circumstances darken.
Iris Murdoch would add that our moral and emotional life depends on what we attend to. When we turn our gaze toward the good—the beauty of small things, the kindness of others, the simple fact of being—we move toward gratitude. Attention, like gratitude, is both chosen and cultivated.
So perhaps that is the quiet task of each morning: to attend to what is good and to act as though gratitude were already present. The feeling may come or it may not, but the practice remains within reach. In the end, choice shapes consciousness. Gratitude, then, is less a gift received than a way of seeing the world.
+Ab.Andy