Self-care interrupted: Can I really be grateful for the tulips?

Philosophy breaks in on a meditative walk

Gratitude is big in the self-care sphere. Rightly so: it boosts both mental and physical health (especially since these aren’t really separate). I’ve been reminded of this recently, as a caregiver to a daughter with a chronic illness. I hear about gratitude as a practice to cultivate both in myself as caregiver and in her as someone living with illness. We could both use gratitude’s benefits.

I realized the other day, however, that something about this language bothers my geeky little philosopher brain. I was out walking, deliberately attending to the world around me, the plants waking up from their winter sleeps, the birdsong, the surprising silence in the air. (Surprising because of its rarity—it’s really not silent outside very often, but you don’t notice that until it happens.) Cultivating, as we say, gratitude for the buds on the neighbor’s magnolia bush, the sun on my shoulders. Appreciating the beauty of the afternoon.

An interruption

But wait, my super-logical side said to me in the middle of this lovely meditation. (I’m picturing the tweed-clad, tortoise-shelled-glasses-wearing little professor on my shoulder in place of the little devil, where on the other (angel) side is the yoga instructor cuing me to breathe.) How can you be grateful for nature? Nature doesn’t exist for you.¹ It’s there, doing its thing, no connection whatsoever to you. What you’re doing is giving it a particular kind of appreciative attention. That’s not gratitude, is it?

My inner philosopher? Photo by Lance Reis on Unsplash

And philosophy begins, with a distinction

Let’s unpack what I seemed to be assuming in that little thought.

1. Gratitude is an appreciative attitude you (should) have when someone provides you a benefit; that is, I seemed to assume it needs to be specifically provided to me and by someone.

2. This didn’t come through in the way I articulated it above, but as I continued thinking at the time I realized that I associate gratitude with a kind of debt: if you’ve benefited me, then it feels like I owe you something (namely, gratitude: at the very least, an expression of thanks; probably also reciprocation of some sort in the future).

If anything like this is right, why do we talk about gratitude for things like budding trees and blooming tulips, or for situations and states of affairs like “that I was able to get some writing done today” or “that I have hot water for my shower”? I’m not indebted to anyone for these things, and no one directly provided me these benefits.²

One easy explanation could be that because of a long history of religious tradition, our language use reflects the background assumption that we’ve been provided these things by a deity to whom we therefore owe gratitude. That’s surely a comforting thought, and I appreciate what’s going on there.³ Even so, I’m really not sure the deity (through the causal chain that includes my neighbor planting them) put the tulips there specifically for me to appreciate them in that particular moment. Their growing really isn’t about me. Neither is the hot water or the confluence of events that left me space to do some writing.

So it seems that there might be two distinguishable phenomena here with a shared core.⁴ On the one hand, we have what I’ll call “gratitude proper,” the thing where I owe an identifiable benefactor some appreciation for what they’ve done specifically for me. On the other hand, we have a gratitude-adjacent attitude that’s appreciating the good things in our lives, but not directed at a precise benefactor and not precisely incurring that debt-ish aspect of gratitude.

Attention, receptivity, and self-care

At the core of both of these attitudes is an attentive appreciation of and receptivity⁵ toward some goodness, something that makes our lives better. Maybe the debt-ish feeling is more like humility or mild awe or wonder, coupled with the idea that in some sense it’s gratuitous—not a thing I had a claim to.

I suspect that what’s doing the self-care work in these attitudes is the attentiveness, the intentional act of noticing what’s good alongside whatever we may be struggling with.⁶ It’s probably related to mindfulness. Maybe it’s like the “careful and just attention” Iris Murdoch points to in The Sovereignty of Good, discussing the inner work of morality.⁷

This shouldn’t be surprising, because gratitude-proper is sometimes thought of in moral terms, as a virtue or an obligation. P.F. Strawson counts gratitude as one of the “reactive attitudes” to others’ good (or ill) will that are the foundation of interpersonal interaction and responsibility. Scottish Enlightenment philosophers Adam Smith and David Hume called gratitude a moral sentiment: it’s something that connects us to one another and acknowledges our interconnectedness. It’s conducive to “fellow-feeling,” which for Hume more or less makes the world go ’round.

I confess that I’ve never read Heidegger, but I understand from conversations with colleagues that his thinking involves cultivating a kind of wonder and gratitude toward Being. This strikes me as a case of the second kind of gratitude, the not directed at a specific benefactor, but involving the core attentiveness and receptivity of gratitude.

Mother’s Day at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum

The other thing about gratitude that I suspect is contributing to the self-care work is—perhaps ironically—that this sort of attentive appreciation pulls us out of ourselves and our troubles, toward something of value that’s external to us. Gratitude only works its magic when we don’t have ourselves in mind. Self-interest might motivate us to practice gratitude, but the gratitude itself is entirely directed outward.

In the case of “gratitude proper,” the objects are both the benefit and the benefactor. Doing one another good turns is something that can both reflect and reinforce or enhance a relationship. It involves seeing one another: the benefactor sees (the needs of) the recipient, and the recipient appreciates both the good they’ve been given and the good will of the benefactor. They’re moved to give back. This suggests that reciprocation is probably a better term here than my initial connection to debt. It’s not really a matter of debt, is it? The reciprocation in gratitude seems more freely given than what I associate with debt.

In the case of the gratitude-adjacent attitude, the thing pulling us out of ourselves might simply be the tulips, the sunshine, the hot water, or the writing time. This too acknowledges our interconnectedness, not necessarily with people, but with our much broader environment (which might include people in the background: the folks who designed, made and installed my water heater, for instance). Often, the gratitude-like nature of this attention moves us to do things similar to what we’re moved to do for a benefactor to whom we feel grateful-proper: reciprocate in some way, take care of it, give back, pay it forward.

So to the extent that gratitude and its sibling motivate reciprocity, they help connect us to other people and the world. Connection is good for our health, and that’s surely another reason why gratitude is good for us.

Can I be grateful for the tulips, then? I still hesitate to call it that, though at the same time I think using the word helps induce the humility and wonder that seem essential to it. I certainly appreciate their presence in my life. And also hot water.

What are you grateful for these days, friends?

1. This is the case whether or not there’s a deity who created it.

2. Well—in the case of the hot water, that’s the result of people having done all the things that made it so that I live in civilization in a house with a water heater. So I can be grateful to all those people. But I think being grateful to all the people who created the circumstances that made my hot shower possible is different from being grateful that I have hot water.

3. Even if this is an illusion, I appreciate illusions:

Don Quixote 2: The Joy of Illusions

4. Turns out, according to the gratitude entry in the SEP, I’m not the first to have thought of this. (Unsurprisingly.)

5. I have in mind here the virtue Michael Slote explores in From Enlightenment to Receptivity: Rethinking Our Values: a kind of empathetic openness that loosens our need for control and can serve as a condition for connection.

6. Which I’ve written about before:

What's going well?

7. Disclaimer: I haven’t read the book in some years and at the time of writing it’s in an office I’m not in, so I may not be getting Murdoch’s picture fully correct.