Gratitude and Resilience
Tending the garden of relationships, institutions, and traditions
Last weekend, after my son's baseball game, it started to sink in that the tropical cyclone we'd been reading about out off the coast of Mexico had a predicted track that didn't look good.
When we woke up Sunday, we knew we'd be in for a tumultuous week. That morning we got word that school was already cancelled for Monday to Wednesday, with Hurricane Milton approaching.
Sunday through Tuesday brought a combination of rushed preparation, dread, and overthinking as the storm slowly made its way toward the states. With every hour it crept over the gulf, the warm water strengthened the storm. The best predictions had it making landfall somewhere between Hernando and Manatee counties — and we're smack in between the two.
We boarded up, emptied the yard, tied down loose furniture, and prepped ourselves for the likely multiday power outage. The storm hit us hard on Wednesday night, with every 100mph gust giving pangs of fear of trees blowing over or our pool screen crumbling and coming over the roof. We grit our teeth and made it through relatively unscathed, unlike many in Florida during both this storm and Helene two weeks prior.
But this wasn't supposed to be a post about hurricanes. We made out fine, much better than many of our fellow Floridians over the past few weeks. The hurricane was just the most recent life challenge that brought to mind the importance of gratitude.
I'm lucky. Lucky to live in a well-connected community with neighbors that support one another. Lucky to have my immediate family in the locale around us. And while it's important to recognize good fortune when it shows up, it's more important to have gratitude for support networks like this. Networks that take time, care, and attention to cultivate.
When it was time to ready up for this storm, the work we put in fostering these connections paid off.
To board up the windows, I'd borrowed some unused spare material from a couple family members. When my neighbor up the road didn't have the right tools or an extra set of hands, a couple of us chipped in and got his house sealed up in a few minutes. After we were all in the calm before the storm the evening before, we got together for the kids to hang out and sat in the driveway having a beer.
In trying moments, it's important not only to feel a sense of gratitude, but to recognize why it's important. Networks of relationships, institutions, and traditions provide a support infrastructure — support that's hard to notice in everyday comfortable moments. When encountering struggle, that safety net of helpful neighbors (or family members, co-congregationists from church, or even teammates from Little League) is put to the test. On a regular day, you don't need the net; everything's cozy and fine. But you really appreciate it beneath you when the time comes.
Gratitude is more than just a feeling — it's a force that strengthens and sustains the systems we rely on. Recently it seems that gratitude as a virtue has faded from public consciousness. Entitlement is all around us. Lack of appreciation for community organizations, the decline of the family, people having fewer and weaker in-person connections. We take for granted the institutions and support systems that make our lives possible, forgetting that they need our active respect and appreciation to endure.
Gratitude is what keeps these structures alive. It’s a way of acknowledging not just what we personally receive, but the efforts of those who came before us to build something worth preserving. When we express gratitude, we not only recognize what's been given to us, but we're more likely to reinforce its value and ensure continuity for future generations.
Without gratitude, the foundations of what we appreciate will erode. Maybe not immediately, but eventually. Ungrateful people can draft for a time off the pre-existing infrastructure built by others that came before, but eventually there'll be nothing left. The safety net will be only tattered remnants that won't catch anything.
The work of gratitude is like the tending of a garden. You don't do it all at once, you can skip a day now and then. It doesn't require backbreaking levels of work every day. But you need to pay attention and do little bits of incremental work regularly to trim, feed, weed, and water, or else it withers away.
The invisible work of communities, infrastructure, and institutions gradually wilts when people stop noticing and stop caring. Systems and institutions are not defaults to be taken for granted. Entitlement is the enemy. Acting as if the systems you inherit are deserved without reinforcement is the fastest way to cripple a culture. Crime-ridden, low-trust societies are places that selfishly ruined their communities through (among many factors) a lack of gratitude. When no one appreciates the good things in life — assuming they just appear as if by magic — they disappear. A garden with no gardener overgrows or rots away.
But most of us have reasons for gratitude beyond merely drawing breath. As Epicurus observed, “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.” Envy for what you don’t have or resentment for what you think others don’t deserve poisons the soul. Gratitude for what you do have opens the heart. These things aren’t simply material, they’re the people in your lives and the memories you’ve shared. “Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy,” Proust advises, for “they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
—Jonah Goldberg, Envy Poisons the Soul, but Gratitude Opens the Heart
Gratitude involves active work. It’s about remembering that everything we cherish — from small, personal relationships to large-scale societal structures — depends on care, maintenance, and appreciation to thrive.
Waiting around for someone else to do the work ensures that the net won't be there when the time comes.
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