The process of leaning how to ride a bike involves a lot of cognitive labor - you have to think about each and every twitch of your muscles and are constantly conscious of everything going wrong. Slowly, you get the hang of it, and you don’t have to think about it as much. Eventually you don’t have to think about how to ride a bike, you just…ride your bike.
And then one day your bike breaks while you’re riding it. Some gear got busted or chain discombobulated or who knows what, and suddenly everything you’d internalized about riding a bike comes bubbling back to the top. You have to rethink how to keep your balance and push on the pedals to limp the bike back home.
This is true of most areas of our lives. Solving life problems is like learning to ride a bike - we put a lot of thought and effort into it and then once the problem is solved it fades into the background, no longer demanding our attention, making way for the next set of problems to take the stage. (1)
This is one reason that gratitude requires so much conscious effort - we are predisposed to focus on our problems. We experience problem-consciousness the way we experience gravity, as an ever-present pull that’s baked into the fabric of reality.
We will also never run out of problems to solve - none of us are God (last I checked), so we will always have limited knowledge and powers and lifespans, and problems will always spring from beyond the horizons of our abilities. It’s good to solve problems, and it’s also good to keep a balanced perspective and not freak out when despite our best efforts problems just keep on popping up.
Given all of this, Thanksgiving is the perfect Holiday for me - it’s a day when we’re all called together to engage in the difficult practice of being grateful, the practice consciously looking for the good in our lives, of consciously looking for the good in each other. It’s a practice that can bring results like those of riding a bike - it’s hard work at first, often confusing and frustrating, and then one day something clicks and gratitude becomes second nature and it’s something that’s no longer so far away from us. One day we’ll find that we had a terrible day indeed and that somehow we were okay(2), that gratitude and fortitude had become second nature. The goal, the dream, is to take gratitude from something we do and make it what we are.
And so: I am grateful, reader, that you’ve read my words today. I hope to be grateful in every domain of life for as long as I can.
Footnotes:
I get this image from Heidegger, who pointed out that our understanding of ‘objects’ is practical before it is contemplative. For example, our everyday awareness of ‘a hammer’ isn’t of its length and weight and chemical composition, our awareness is of its use for hammering. We know how to use it to hammer things, and we mostly think about its objective properties if it breaks and we have to think about how to fix it and make it useful again. We also can’t practically understand hammering without practically understanding the hammer-ability of what we’re hammering, without practically understanding the toolbox where we put the hammer after hammering, and on and on and on. Our everyday practical lives are embedded in non-conscious systems of significance, a world of meaning. I think this is basically correct, and that as such the proper task of cognitive activity is to call chunks of this world forth and make them explicit in conversation and to give us the opportunity to reflect on them before returning them to the background. I say ‘chunks’ deliberately - all of our beliefs are up for grabs, just not all of them at once.
This is one of the key themes of James Joyce’s Ulysses - he inverts the Greek myth by making his hero not a conqueror but unconquerable. Leopold Bloom ends his long and awful day by climbing into bed with his wife who had spent the afternoon having an incredibly passionate affair, featuring the kind of sex that rearranged most of the furniture in the house and soaked the bed with another man’s fluids. She didn’t even bother to clean up. Even so, lying there, left rather dramatically emotionally homeless, Bloom somehow manages to feel grateful to be alive and basically alright.