Cultivating gratitude

We have heard it countless times. We should be grateful. Grateful that we are healthy, that we can eat our fill, that we have a roof over our heads and clothes to keep us warm. Not least, we should be grateful that we live in Norway. We are so lucky that we can lose our job, or worse, fall ill, and still have enough for food and clothes. And we have that roof over our heads.

Even so, we sometimes wake up day after day feeling discouraged. Not grateful.

Discouraged because all you feel is that you are alone. Discouraged because you miss doing your yoga in a room full of other breathing, living people. Because you hardly remember what it was like to eat together, talk together, talk over each other, argue loudly, agree and disagree. Quarrel, laugh, shout and squeeze even closer together to make room for one more.

Goodness, how good it is to quarrel. To quarrel and shove and still look each other in the eye and know that exactly that look means we are friends anyway. That look, which you can only see when you are closer than two metres. Which does not show on Zoom or Teams or all the other distant closeness we have got so used to.

This is where toothache comes in handy. Can you remember that awful toothache? The one you no longer have, but which overshadowed everything while it was there? Do you remember how much it hurt? That you could not think of anything else, and that liquid food was all you could eat for weeks because chewing was impossible?

Or perhaps you remember the bad back? The one that meant you could not do a bridge for months, and could hardly sit or walk normally.

And here is the point: can you remember the joy of eating slices of bread again? That bread with brown cheese tasted like the best thing in the world, and the crusts were heavenly? The conviction that you would never tire of chewing hard crusts?

Or when the back pain eased and you could take long steps again, not just tiptoe about in mouse steps because that was the only thing that did not send needles of pain through your lower back? And do you remember the first careful bridge, which later grew deeper until you had finally forgotten what it was like to have a bad back? Or toothache?

That is the feeling! How can we learn to cultivate the feeling of not having toothache?

Photo: Darja Olsevskaja.