Thoughts about Gratitude, and a list of things I like

The idea of a “gratitude practice” has always bothered me, particularly when proposed as a remedy for depression. Every therapist has recommended gratitude journals to me and I have always refused, because it seems like the detox antioxidant smoothie version of “chin up, it’s not so bad” or “pull yourself together, you’re lucky to have this job/home/relationship/family”, i.e. meant to serve as an affirmation of the status quo, no matter how miserable. The smoothie articles never seem to take into account the fact that “you should be grateful” is an oft-weaponized phrase.

So I try to put it into more specific terms for myself, without that ugly cudgel of a word.

First, there’s humility: be cognizant of the advantages I enjoy, earned and unearned. Recognize when luck is operating in my favor. Know and acknowledge how other people have enabled my accomplishments, satisfactions, and pleasures. Make sure I understand the place of all of this in the story of my life. Understand that my achievements and disappointments, while important to me, don’t count for much in the larger world.

Then, reverence: the world is bigger than me and full of things I do not understand, and that is a good thing, because any world in which I occupied the most important role would be a meager one. It’s an honor to enlarge myself into the world, to climb a tree so I can see over the ridge.

Then affirmation: I am capable of appreciating beauty. I am capable of experiencing the world’s great pleasures, which include eating, drinking, dancing, and fucking. Also open to me are the great human experiences: loving and being loved, pride in accomplishment and creativity, intimate friendship, giving gifts and receiving them, being the cause or agent of something good.

Today, which is wrought with heavy significance for Americans (and therefore particularly bleak this year) and an ordinary day for everyone else (so just regular-bleak), I would like to focus on this last one, Affirmation, because there’s no better weapon against bleakness than listing your favorite things.

This list of things Roland Barthes likes has been floating around twitter, and I’ll paste it here:

I like: salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan, the smell of new-cut hay (why doesn’t someone with a “nose” make such a perfume), roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely held political convictions, Glenn Gould, too-cold beer, flat pillows, toast, Havana cigars, Handel, slow walks, pears, white peaches, cherries, colors, watches, all kinds of writing pens, desserts, unrefined salt, realistic novels, the piano, coffee, Pollock, Twombly, all romantic music, Sartre, Brecht, Verne, Fourier, Eisenstein, trains, Médoc wine, having change, Bouvard and Pécuchet, walking in sandals on the lanes of southwest France, the bend of the Adour seen from Doctor L.’s house, the Marx Brothers, the mountains at seven in the morning leaving Salamanca, etc.

I love that “etc” at the end, as though to say, well, you know the rest.

In the affirmatory spirit, here’s my own list (some of which overlaps with his):

Cardamom, cloves, mulled wine, cinnamon rolls, cilantro, preserved lemons, champagne, stiff cocktails, limes, nectarines, raspberries, Chopin, Richard Strauss, peonies, showtunes, copper, navy blue, sharp cheeses, Proust, banter with intelligent people, party dresses with massive angular shoulders, Joan Crawford, Shirley Hazzard, Gene Kelly, Claude Rains, Greta Garbo’s face and voice, Serge Lutens in his fruit-and-spices phase, beautiful tilework, cursive handwriting, Tiffany glass, Louis Majorelle, Poulenc, Balzac, being generous with friends, the city of Sydney, cities in general, reading in the morning, perfect novellas, hot baths, aggressive wallpaper, double-breasted blazers, lipstick, false eyelashes, tall boots, grand pianos with really good action, showing a favorite movie to a friend and they wind up loving it too, crying at the opera, crying during Mahler, green valleys, hotel beds, nachos, tarot cards, warm and sunny weather, donuts in all their international varieties, Montreal smoked meat, Montreal bagels, Iris Murdoch, Scarlatti, Vienna Seccession art as well as the general aesthetic, Sondheim, sexy and gossipy memoirs, when a friend and I both hate the same heavily-praised book or movie, dancing, being on an airplane, toffee, overdressing, etc.