You Don't Deserve It

Gratitude is the key to a happy and fulfilled life, or so I hear repeatedly, from books, podcasts, magazines, and movies. But how do I do it, exactly? How do I make myself grateful?

I've kept gratitude journals and I send thank you cards. I've even foisted these ideas onto my children, telling them to be grateful for the tofu on their plate, or the math flash cards I gave them for Christmas. But instead of making them grateful, my words just seem to make them feel bad. It's not so different from how I feel when I'm down and come across an exhortation to practice gratitude. Logically, I know that I'm lucky. That's just not how it always feels.

Perhaps I'm the only one who sometimes goes through the motions of gratitude while wondering if I should be feeling something else, something more. Or maybe everyone feels this way sometimes. I have no idea.

I say that I'm grateful, and I should, even if sometimes I don't feel it. Others should believe I am thankful for their time, their possessions, and their affection. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if gratitude, that genuine feeling of being thankful, can be manufactured at all. If I can't make myself laugh, if I can't summon affection or surprise, why do I believe I can conjure gratitude?

None of this had occurred to me until I read Kent Haruf's novel Plainsong, which is about a few people in rural Colorado getting mixed up in each others' lives. At one point the protagonist, Tom Guthrie, looks into a mirror and says: "You don't deserve it. Don't ever even begin to think that you do."

We never find out what Guthrie believes he is undeserving of. His inquisitive nine- and ten-year-old sons? Or the woman who's just invited him to dinner? But it doesn't matter, because as soon as I read those lines I felt that God himself had unveiled the secret of the universe, or at least the part about conjuring gratitude. The central question, the question I try to ask myself every day is, Do I deserve it? And the answer is an emphatic No, capitalized and bolded and underlined and in italics.

Take even the most basic quality, something I take for granted constantly, like being able to walk. Do I deserve to be able to walk? Is someone in a wheelchair not deserving? There are all sorts of mental gymnastics I could spin myself through, all sorts of justifications for why I deserve, but deep down I know that I'm no more deserving of my ability to walk than someone who can't. Acknowledging that I am undeserving all but forces me to feel gratitude, to see walking as a divine and miraculous gift.

This same question can be applied to anything. Do I deserve the meal in front of me? No? Then it is a gift. Do I deserve the company of Rachael, my wife? Absolutely not, try as I might to be deserving. And so this day I spent with her, and the thousands (thousands!) I've already enjoyed are a gift, too. Do I deserve another day? Do any of us?