Does Gratitude Equal Happiness?

 I interact frequently with some who have enormous difficulty finding something for which to be grateful. They are pretty much convinced that their lives suck, and that if there is any kind of God at all, that God has all but said “You I don’t care for much”.

They are unhappy people. I know - I was one. I was an eternal victim, and it was too hard to break out of that thinking to see something which may have been a positive. I couldn’t possibly be grateful for anything, because I was too busy being miserable. That misery was a mud pit - there simply were no roses to stop and smell, from my vantage point.

I certainly equated gratitude with happiness. I wasn’t happy, therefore I had nothing to be grateful for. Only those who had reasons to be happy could feel gratitude - they were the lucky ones, or, according to the people I was learning from, they were the special people God had blessed with abundance because of their ‘faithfulness’, whatever that meant.

I used this an excuse for drinking a little, drinking a lot, and ultimately drinking too much. That became an endless loop of unworthiness, unhappiness, and anger at everyone, especially myself. Gratitude? No way.

For me, a spiritual awareness came from finally recognizing that I was about as far from living my best life as possible, and eventually finding the humility to admit that I was an alcoholic. I had to come to the rooms, be humbled some more, and start over on myself from the ground up. I recognized my God, my Source, my Creator, and that gave me a measure of peace. I could find gratitude in that, even if I was still extremely unhappy. I began to accept that there was not a system of ranking individuals from the Divine perspective (my view - you get to have your own).

To me, expressing true, real, deep gratitude is what constitutes peace. That peace can be called ‘serenity’. I can feel that all is well, whether or not I’m ‘happy’ in any given moment.

In this moment, I am grateful for my life, my sobriety, the opportunities as well as the challenges. It is in those challenges that I find out how my Creator operates, and for that, I am deeply grateful. See? Gratitude is also a loop.