Active Hope. Joanna Macy
determination, and the help of allies.
With the shift of perception that seeing with new eyes brings, you can let go of feeling you need to sort everything out. Instead you focus on finding and playing your part, offering your gift of Active Hope, your best contribution to the healing of our world. As you move into going forth, you consider what this might be, and what your next step will be. Then you take that step.
What we’ve described here is a short form of the spiral that might only take a few minutes to move round. Like a fractal that has the same characteristic shape whatever scale it is viewed at, the form of the spiral can be applied to a wide range of time frames, with rotations happening over minutes, hours, days, or weeks. We move through the four stations in a way that supports our intention to act for the sake of life on Earth. The more familiar you become with this strengthening journey, the more you can trust the spiral structure process. Each of these stations contains hidden depths, rich meaning, and treasures to explore. It is to these that we turn in the chapters ahead.
“A felt sense of wonder, thankfulness, and appreciation for life” is how the renowned psychologist Robert Emmons defines gratitude.1 If you’re feeling low, it might seem like a stretch to focus on something so positive. Yet recognizing the gifts in your life is profoundly strengthening. By savoring these gifts, you add to your psychological buoyancy, which helps you maintain your balance and poise when entering rougher waters. That is why we begin our workshops this way. Gratitude enhances our resilience, strengthening us to face disturbing information.
GRATITUDE PROMOTES A SENSE OF WELL-BEING
Recent research has shown that people experiencing high levels of gratitude tend to be happier and more satisfied with their lives.2 Are they grateful because they’re happy, or does gratitude make people happier? To find out, volunteers were asked to keep gratitude journals, in which, at regular intervals, they recorded events they felt thankful for. Controlled trials have shown this simple intervention to have a profound and reliable impact on mood.3 Indeed, the results are so striking that if a medication were invented with similar benefits, we’d probably see it described as a new wonder drug.
The process of keeping a gratitude journal focuses your attention on things you feel good about. If each evening, before you go to bed, you ask yourself, “What happened today that I’m pleased about or thankful for?” that question will direct your gaze. You start searching your memory for moments that bring a smile to your face or that trigger a glow of appreciation. They might be small things, such as a conversation with a friend, a moment watching a bird in flight, or the satisfaction of completing a task. When we’re busy, moments like these can too easily pass us by. Keeping a gratitude diary builds them into a pool of memories we can keep dipping back into.
When we get into the habit of keeping this kind of journal, we train our minds to notice the upside of life more easily and quickly. Experiencing gratitude is a learnable skill that improves with practice. It isn’t dependent on things going well or on receiving favors from others. It’s about getting better at spotting what’s already there.
TRY THIS: A GRATITUDE PRACTICE
Notice: Scan your recent memories and identify something that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours that you’re pleased about. It doesn’t have to be anything big, just something that makes you think, “I’m glad that happened.”
Savor: Close your eyes and imagine that you are experiencing that moment again. Notice colors, tastes, sounds, smells, and the sensations in your body. Notice also how you feel in yourself.
Give thanks: Who or what helped this moment to happen? Was anyone (or anything) else involved? If so, think of them and imagine expressing your thanks.
There are two sides to gratitude: the first is appreciation, where you’re valuing something that has happened, and the second is attribution, where you’re recognizing the role of someone or something else in bringing it about. Even when you’re grateful to yourself, it is likely that others played a role in your development of the skill, strength, or quality you used. Gratitude is a social emotion. It points our warmth and goodwill out toward others.
GRATITUDE BUILDS TRUST AND GENEROSITY
Think of the people you trust. Do you also feel grateful toward them or suspect they feel gratitude toward you? Gratitude feeds trust, because it helps us acknowledge the times we’ve been able to count on one another. Not surprisingly, research shows we’re more likely to help those we feel grateful to, leading to a positive spiral of helping, gratitude, trust, and cooperation.4 Because of this, gratitude plays a key role in the evolution of cooperative behavior and societies.
When gratitude levels are high, not only are we more inclined to return favors, but we’re also more likely to assist complete strangers. In the 1970s American psychologist Alice Isen demonstrated this in an experiment in which coins were left in public phone booths so that the next person using them would get a free call.5 When the person had finished and was leaving the phone booth, one of the experimenters appeared to accidentally drop a file of papers just in front of the subject. This process was repeated near phone boxes that hadn’t been primed with coins. People receiving the unexpected lucky gift of a free phone call were much more likely to help the experimenter pick up her papers. This experiment, and a host of others like it, suggests that our willingness to act on behalf of others isn’t just attributable to some people being good-natured and others less so. Our readiness to help others is influenced by the level of gratitude we experience.
GRATITUDE AS AN ANTIDOTE TO CONSUMERISM
While gratitude leads to increased happiness and life satisfaction, materialism — placing a higher value on material possessions than on meaningful relationships — has the opposite effect. In reviewing the research, psychologists Emily Polak and Michael McCullough conclude: “The pursuit of wealth and possessions as an end unto itself is associated with lower levels of well-being, lower life satisfaction and happiness, more symptoms of depression and anxiety, more physical problems such as headaches, and a variety of mental disorders.”6
Affluenza is a term used to describe the emotional distress that arises from a preoccupation with possessions and appearance. Psychologist Oliver James views it as a form of psychological virus that infects our thinking and is transmitted by television, glossy magazines, and advertisements. The toxic belief at the core of this condition is that happiness is based on how we look and what we have. If we compare our appearance or wealth to that of the models and millionaires on prime-time television, it is easy to feel we don’t measure up so well. James comments, “Since programmes are saturated with exceptionally attractive people living abnormally opulent lives, expectations of what is ‘normal’ are raised.”7
When women were asked to rate their self-esteem and satisfaction with their appearance, measures for both fell after the women looked at photos of models in women’s magazines.8 How we feel depends so much on what we compare ourselves to, and an increase in eating disorders is one of the consequences of having thin models as a reference group. In 1995, the year television was introduced to Fiji, there were no recorded cases of bulimia on the island.