I’m sure we’ve all been given the advice at one point or another to write down the things we’re grateful for. Keep a gratitude journal or write it in your planner or meditate on all the great things in your life, even if life doesn’t feel so great. And it’s relatively easy when we have things to be grateful for. I can usually mindlessly fill out that portion of my planner just by thinking back to my day, feeling accomplished at work, lunch with a friend, snuggling with my dog. Check. Done. Move on. On slightly more terrible days I can still thank my bed for keeping me warm, the YouTube algorithm for serving me distracting video essays, and the well below my house for clean and refreshing water.
If acknowledging gratitude has felt empty or become too easy, I challenge you take a Stoic approach to gratitude. Instead of acknowledging our abundance, take a step further into embracing scarcity. Imagine for a moment, a life without. A life without your job. Your friends. Your family. Your home. Imagine you are alone and cold. Imagine that one day you’ll be on your death bed and soon you will take your final breath.
What are you grateful for now?
Are you grateful for the sunshine? The clothes on your back? The toes on you feet?
Strip your gratitude further. Imagine it is snowy and you are unclothed and frostbitten.
Can we extend gratitude, true gratitude, for these moments of nothingness because to acknowledge and feel uncomfortable with nothing, it means that at one point we knew and were comfortable with something? Can we find comfort and peace within that nothing and feel gratitude for the stinging sensation on our skin, for it means we are alive? For the cold in our lungs because it means we are breathing? Because one day we will not be, the ultimate Nothing.
This is not an effort of self flagellation but of absolute freedom. When we make peace with the notion that the breath in our lungs will one day too cease, we are able to realize how superfluous the rest is.
Diogenes of Sinope, a fixture of Ancient Philosophy was described as the first Cynic. To be cynical, kynikos, is to be dog-like, an insult for those without shame. And shame was not the only thing Diogenes lacked. One of my favorite parables of Diogenes is that he only owned two things, the clothes on his back and a cup for drinking out of the public wells. One day at the well, he saw a young child run up and drink with his hands and in that moment he threw his cup on the ground and exclaimed, “A child has beaten me in plainness of living!” The search for a simple life, for Diogenes was not out of neglect of self, but of celebration. What little one could have to experience a fulfilled life, what a blessing to live in such abundance to own a cup when our hands make do.
Perhaps my true favorite Diogenes parable is that of his meeting with Alexander the Great. Upon his conquest, Alexander reached Corinth searching for the wisest man and was directed to a nude man sunning himself in the park. Alexander stood above Diogenes and asked if there was anything the man needed, only to be met with Diogenes response, ‘please, step out of my sun.’ Later Alexander would write, “If I were not Alexander than I would wish to be Diogenes!” I don’t believe Diogenes would say the same about Alexander.
So take a moment today to be intentional about your gratitude. Meditate on your eventual nothingness. Be grateful for what you have, what you have not, and what you will inevitably lose. Give your family, friends, and pets a hug.
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