Training in Compassion 11: Be Grateful to Everyone

Be grateful to everyone. Very simple but very profound.

We began life entirely dependent on others, and, while we now exercise greater autonomy than infants, we are still dependent on others to grow our food, till the soil, transport the food, staff the stores where we get it. We depend on others to make our cars and pave the roads and extract and refine the fuel. Make our clothes and our homes. But more.

It's thanks to others and their presence and effort that you have friendship and love and meaning in your life. It’s thanks to others that we are who we are. They cared for us, taught us, gave us the language that we think in – the language in which we tell ourselves the story of who we are, what we’re trying to do, what we’re feeling. We didn’t invent this language that constitutes ourselves.

The idea of an independent, isolated, atomized person is impossible. Every thought in our minds every emotion that we feel, every word that comes out of our mouth, every material sustenance we need to get through the day, comes through the kindness of and the interaction with others.

And not only other humans. Our nonhuman companions, the wildlife that sustain ecosystems that sustain us, and the animals whose pain and flesh provides food for some humans all contribute to making us who we are. Indeed, the whole of the earth, the soil, the sky, the trees, the air we breathe and water we drink constitute us. We not only depend on all of this, we are all of it and it is us.

Gratitude is the happiest of attitudes: you simply cannot be grateful and unhappy at the same time. So be grateful to everyone all the time.

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