An interconnected guide to gratitude

How much do you have to be grateful for?

If you made a list of things to be thankful for in your life, how many things do you suppose you would write down? A dozen? Two dozen? A hundred maybe?

Whatever the number, I can almost guarantee the list falls far short. Don’t worry, I’m not suggesting that you’re some kind of ingrate. It’s just that the amount there is to actually be grateful for in our lives is so mind-bogglingly vast.

That becomes readily apparent when we look at gratitude through the lens of an interconnected world.

In taking stock of things to be grateful for, it’s natural for that list to be centered primarily in a relatively close orbit around you. People you know. Your possessions. Personal experiences. There probably wouldn’t be all that many things on your list that are too many degrees removed from you.

It makes sense. Those are the things we personally experience. Those are the things most likely to obviously affect us. But it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Why practice gratitude?

Before we go any further exploring opportunities for gratitude, let’s take a quick look at why you should even bother.

I call gratitude the well-being wonderdrug. There is so much research pointing to the benefits of gratitude, ranging from better psychological health to better physical health to better relationships, even to benefits for your career.

This article offers an excellent overview of the many benefits of gratitude and some of the research behind it.

Gratitude in an interconnected world

OK, now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a closer look at just how friggin’ much there is to be grateful for in this life!

[Check out these 35 Gratitude-prompting questions.]

A great way to expand your awareness of gratitude opportunities is to look at your life through various aspects of its inherent interconnectedness. For the sake of this post, I’m going to look at it from three angles:

Support: The support you have received in your life.

Enabling factors: Things that contributed to positive aspects of your life.

Types of interconnection: The different systems you benefit from.

One point to note before we dive in. Taking an expansive view like this can get overwhelming, so I’m not suggesting that you try to appreciate it all. The exercises below are intended to give you a taste of just how much is there once you start following gratitude down the rabbit hole.

Feel free to brainstorm to your heart’s delight, but to make it into a specific gratitude practice you can actually apply, pick three things from any of the lists you create and acknowledge them with gratitude. Savor them. Make it personal.

Let’s look at those three examples of interconnectedness one at a time.

Support

This is one of the most obvious ways to look at it. Where have you gotten support in your life?

That support might take many forms. For example, it might be emotional support (like a friend offering a compassionate ear). Or family support (like your parents when you were growing up). It could be professional support (like a boss who played a mentor role). Or it might be the support of a system (like insurance paying for a surgery).

To get your brain percolating, you can use question words. Make a list for each. Make it a brainstorm, and keep adding to the resulting list as more occurs to you.

Who: Who has supported you?

Run through the cast of characters in your life from the time you were a small child to the present. Who were the supporters along the way?

What: What kind of support have you gotten?

You might start this one by brainstorming as many ways as you can think of that support comes (advice, financial, emotional, implementation, knowledge, etc.) , then looking back to see where the support has come in each of those areas.

When: What support have you gotten in different periods of your life?

Look at the different periods in the timeline of your life. What kind of support did you get? From whom?

How: How has support been given?

This is another variation on the “what kind of support” theme.

Where: In each location in your life, what support have you gotten?

Location might be geographic, especially if you have moved around, but it can also be different areas of your life. For example, at work, at home, at your swing dance class, at your faith institution, at the DMV (yeah, OK, that one might be a stretch).

Enabling factors

Believe it or not, even after that exploration we’re still only at the tip of the iceberg.

In this one, we’re going to look at what I think of as enabling factors. “ _______ so that ________.”

Years ago, as I was experimenting with a daily morning gratitude practice, I found that my scope of awareness naturally expanded. I was sitting there drinking my morning coffee and – after appreciating the taste, and the smell, and the warmth, and the experience – I started thinking about everything that had gone into my being able to enjoy that cup.

An incomplete list included things like:

• The coffee farmer who grew the coffee.
• The workers who picked the beans.
• The warehouse that stored the beans.
• The ship that brought the beans to the US.
• The truck that brought the beans to Seattle.
• The trucker who drove that truck.
• The people who roasted the coffee.
• The driver who delivered the coffee to my grocery store.
• The clerk who stocked the coffee.

Each of those things (and many more) played a vital role in my ability to savor the cup I held in my hand. And – if I wanted to go deep into the weeds – each of those things had a web supporting its existence and ability to play its particular role.

A fun way to use this idea as a practice is to take something you enjoy (like your morning coffee), and make a laundry list of what contributed to your ability to experience it.

Then take each item in turn and practice feeling thankful for it. Not just intellectually thinking, “yeah, I’m grateful,” but feeling what it’s like to look the farmer in the eye and say thank you. Or imagining how you wouldn’t even have that coffee available without that roaster.

Types of interconnection

Another way to explore how much potential there is for gratitude is to look at the different systems of interconnection. For example…

Infrastructure: The vast network of roads, bridges, power supplies, and transportation systems that make life as you know it possible.

Education: This could be both personal (the education you got) and societal (the education that makes it possible for society to function.

Resources: All the resources you have access to, and the systems that provided them.

Social/Network: Your social and professional network.

Economic: Both the economy as a whole and the individual parts, large scale and small scale, that keep it moving.

Food: The system the grows, harvests, transports, and sells the food you eat.

Those are just a few examples of exploring gratitude from a systems perspective. In each of those (or any other system), you can start asking questions, like, “Who are the players? What makes this system work? How is this system beneficial? What does this system enable?”

Parting thought

The goal of this post isn’t to get you to make a comprehensive map of all the opportunities for gratitude in your life. It’s simply to shine a spotlight on how much there is there and offer some ideas for discovering it.

Until you see it, you can’t appreciate it. And until you appreciate it, you won’t get the benefits of gratitude.

So explore. Notice. And savor!

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