"Please create something good every day, and don't destroy anything"

In my previous post Let’s not try to look for gratitude in the eye of the storm, I talked about the complexities of finding gratitude in the midst of utter devastation and disappointment, or the severe loss and trauma that we are witnessing in war-torn areas around the world. I relayed this through the eyes of Karyna, a Ukrainian refugee who now lives in Estonia.

In our initial discussion I mentioned to Karyna that I am currently working on another book, part of which will be about how to find gratitude in the midst of extreme adversity. It will therefore try to address the very dilemmas about practising gratitude that she is struggling with. I explained that I don’t really know the answers but want to listen to people like her, and Karyna immediately agreed to be interviewed. She asked if it could be there and then as she wanted the world to know and act on what is going on in Ukraine.

I was brought to tears throughout our conversation. It moved me very deeply and has had a deep impact on the way I feel I need to try to live my life. What can I do in my everyday life to respond to the situation in Ukraine, and the conflict elsewhere?

When I asked Karyna if she had a message on how we should live our lives in response to the devastation she has witnessed, she said “please just create something good every day, and don’t destroy anything”.

How do you think you could respond to this request? Does creating something mean being more creative with your time or other areas of your life? Does destroying something perhaps mean just wasting precious time? You might immediately think of how we can preserve the environment rather than destroying it in the numerous choices we have to value and preserve materials in our daily life.

What comes to mind for me is how I can create or destroy relationships in my life – be they with colleagues, friends or family. It seems the place where I can be most destructive is when I stray into judging, blaming, backbiting…ways of coping that mainly arise from unresolved resentment. Karyna’s plea reminded me that it’s the everyday resentments that lead to the larger ones that drive our wars. How we speak and think about others creates a toxic flow out into our homes, workplaces, countries and continents.

If we practise what I call ‘deep gratitude’ when we are hurting because someone has perhaps broken our expectations or made us feel small, it nudges us towards a different perspective. It helps us to realise that we have a choice in how we are going to respond. Although it takes courage and humility, gratitude at these times can heal the relationship, ourselves, and – through the butterfly effect – the world. It’s gratitude that helps turn our attention to the good we have already received from the person whom we feel has hurt us, and therefore value our connection with them more fully. It’s our gratitude that can help them value this more themselves. As the sociologist Georg Simmel says, “Gratitude is the moral memory of humankind”.

Resentment, on the other hand, can make us feel that it’s okay to hold on to a grudge not just for a few weeks or months, but even decades. As one audience member proclaimed in a Q & A session after a presentation I gave recently: “But I love my resentment. It’s part of who I am”. To even contemplate looking for the good in the person who has wronged us, and to think about what we have received from them in the past can threaten our sense of identity, especially if we have held on to the resentment for a long time.

We somehow feel uplifted or vindicated by holding on to a sense of injustice and then spilling it out in going over and over it with whomever will listen. We gather allies and they feel they have an ally in us to do the same about their own resentments. There is a misplaced kind of comfort here.

It may be helpful to see that there is an art to practising gratitude in difficult relationships. As I’ve mentioned it takes courage and humility. It also takes patience and time. An important skill in developing this art is to grasp the diametrically opposite ways in which resentment destroys goodness whereas gratitude creates it. Gratitude brings people together, resentment isolates. Gratitude brings warmth, acceptance, joy and love; resentment alienates. Gratitude opens us up to what we have been given; resentment ruminates about what has been taken away. Gratitude builds and sustains relationships; resentment undermines and destroys them.

With Christmas nearing for many of us, it can be a tricky time, especially if we dread having to spend time with people who we feel have hurt or just ignored us. We might even avoid a Christmas gathering as resentment tends to rule our decision-making and causes us to retreat or isolate ourselves.

To help us practise gratitude in difficult relationships, it’s important to see it as an action, rather than a feeling we need to hold all the time. In this instance, we just take one action with a heart of gratitude, knowing that no matter how small, it has the power to loosen the hold of resentment. Such an action could be to deliberately choose to sit next to the person at the Christmas dinner table, or to choose a gift for them while thinking about what you have been grateful for them in the past. It could be simply giving them a warm greeting or a smile.

Actually, these are not small acts of gratitude. When we are resentful, they are huge. They are very powerful ways of creating something good, rather than destroying anything. Just taking the courageous step of even contemplating what you can be grateful for in the person is already taking agency for how you are going to respond.

Gratitude has an amazing illuminating power to show me where it’s missing in my life. When I think about expressing gratitude to certain people at a few gatherings this Christmas, I immediately sense how challenging it might be to be sincerely grateful. This shows me that I am not there yet, and I am grateful for this. However, Karyna’s plea has given me a new sense of urgency and motivation to work on these relationships, one at a time, one gratitude practice at a time. For I firmly believe that if everyone in the world took just one difficult relationship in their lives and worked on healing that relationship through practising gratitude, this would be a significant contribution to greater harmony and hope in the world.