Thanksgiving is the quintessential week for gratitude here in the United States. We celebrate Thanksgiving as an autumn harvest festival (sorta), though it strikes me that we are a bit late in that cycle of the seasons. Most countries around the northern hemisphere lift the harvest in October. Abraham Lincoln officially established the fourth Thursday of November as a national holiday 1863 amid the Civil War.

However, the practice of gratitude is worth attending to for numerous reasons beyond this week alone. It’s a remedy for our wandering mind, filled with worries or other forms of negative thinking. Life becomes a struggle to survive instead of the fulfillment of great promise.

If you are like me and other human beings, you have moments when you feel stressed or anxious and other times when life just depresses you. What do you do in those moments? One option is to wallow in misery. Sometimes that is satisfying…for a bit. Eventually, I would prefer to move out of that state, but I don’t want to do so without asking essential questions about what lesson I might need to learn from this buy of melancholy or anxiousness.

Yet there are moments when I need to move beyond the mellow yellow or the ginned-up worry. What to do then?

I know this may sound counter-intuitive, even ridiculous. But the answer is to give thanks. Yup, offer gratitude for something, anything. Thank you that I have shoes. I’m grateful for the ability to read. Muchas gracias por el baño de mi casa. Yes, I’ve stated gratitude for indoor plumbing, antibiotics, and baseball—no connection between those three. I find saying it out loud gives it more power. After about 30-60 seconds of offering gratitude, I have found my mood improves, and that little nonsense I was worried about fades. In brief, I suddenly seem to wake up out of my mellow yellow stew.

I learned this from the psychologist Phil Stutz, featured in the Netflix documentary Stutz. (Careful observers of the film will see a scene where Phil Stutz and the actor Jonah Hill are thumbing through Carl Jung’s Red Book) Phil writes about the practice of gratitude in his imminently practical and contender for maybe the most honest down-to-earth self-help book ever written, titled The Tools: 5 Tools to Help You Find Courage, Creativity, and Willpower--And Inspire You to Live Life in Forward Motion. It may also get the award for the longest subtitle evah!

The actor Jonah Hill with Psychologist Phil Stutz

Here’s a link to the first 28 pages for a free preview. I find this book widely available at most public libraries.

The week ahead might be an opportunity to offer gratitude to someone else. But maybe the person who needs a short 60-second run of giving thanks is you.

Embrace the week ahead. It’s the only one you have.

More to Come,

James Hazelwood, author, and photographer, writes and captures mystery and spirituality in the ordinary and every day, sometimes even the mundane and the muddy. His website is www.jameshazelwood.net