The Healing Power of Gratitude

And now we enter the season of gratitude.

In Alcoholics Anonymous gratitude is a foundation of sobriety during the year's seasons, and the shorter seasons that live in each day.

The 12-Steps of AA and other recovery groups offer a design for living. They promote personal accountability, peace and happiness, generosity of spirit, spiritual freedom, rigorous honesty, humility, community, redemption and good work. The world would be a better place if everyone worked them.

For many, gratitude is the most important gift of the 12 Steps. People in recovery swear by its healing properties and its ability to take us out of our selfish selves.

But this feeling isn't confined to the realms of fellowships and faith, self-help groups or stupid luck. Gratitude spreads its sweet essence of healing in all human endeavors, miniscule and mammoth, pervasive at all levels of society.

In the halls of power gratitude is often relegated to the scrap heap of emotions as leaders cavalierly butt heads on intractable public issues. That hurts all of us. Testosterone and vanity seal off the gentler emotions from the spirit that fosters negotiations in good faith.

With a "gratitude attitude" the armor would fall away from these public warriors and allow compromises that advance the public good.

Of course.

We can rage against the neighborhood Grinch or rail against high taxes, politicians, corporatists, Tea Partiers or religion, but we can be grateful for the freedom we have to do so.

We can revile Putin, Kim Jong Il, Bin Laden, third-world despots, tin-horn dictators, hubris-laden billionaires, global polluters, pious sexual deviants, and Internet pirates who steal our identities.

These sinister forces set a standard of what not to become; we can be grateful for all of us who live by a standard higher than theirs.

When we say thank you, we become grateful for what we are. Gratitude breaks us out of the prison walls of our interior selves, and transforms that positive emotion into positive action. That is why we should be grateful for our bitter conflicts, because in time, and with good will, we will resolve them.