Choose an Attitude of Gratitude - Just a Platitude?

A piece about gratitude for Brainz online. Here are some bits:

People say just choose to be happy…or grateful…or yadda, yadda (enter your positive emotion here). No doubt how you respond to situations is a choice, but it is not as easy as this advice would make it seem. There is some work, or more accurately some intentionality, involved. It’s a practice. We have to exercise our gratitude muscles to make them responsive and resilient.

Gratitude has been shown to bring psychological, physiological, social and spiritual benefits. It is also related to a constellation of other positive emotions including joy, self-esteem, motivation, social connection, and generosity or service. I like how Emmons puts it; we become greater participants in our lives rather than spectators, or as Kimmerer says about listening to the Thanksgiving Address of the Onondaga Nation School, you can’t help feeling wealthy. Gratitude promotes a feeling of abundance, which serves as an antidote to the feeling of scarcity, the “hungry ghost” energy, that drives consumerism. 

Jewish tradition says we should say 100 blessings a day. Can we just choose an attitude of gratitude? It is a simple concept but not easy to do, especially with the constant messages we receive from media and other distractions in the world today. There are many gratitude journals for sale that suggest taking time each day writing down the things for which one is grateful. This is effective, and writing is more concrete than just thinking about these things, but Emmons cautions against taking on another obligation that feels like a burden. There are many useful suggestions out there about “doing” gratitude. Here are some pointers from my perspective about cultivating the attitude.