I wrote this one in the car, Isaac. Driving from Saundersfoot to Bristol to catch a train up to London for work. It’s a good few hours on the road, and this one had been sitting with me for a while.
I want to get something straight before I say anything else. Gratitude isn’t a feeling.
That matters. Because if it were a feeling, you’d only have it when things were going well. And the times you most need gratitude are usually the times it’s hardest to feel anything good at all. So if gratitude is a feeling, it’s useless precisely when you need it most.
But it isn’t a feeling. It’s a practice. A deliberate act of attention. Choosing to notice what you have, rather than fixating on what you don’t.
That distinction changes everything.
Is gratitude something you learn?
For me, yes. There are people who seem naturally more grateful than others, maybe that’s temperament. But gratitude is also clearly teachable. There are practices for it, biblical instruction on it, and a decent amount of psychological evidence that it works. Journaling three things you’re thankful for, done consistently, produces measurable shifts in wellbeing. The research is real.
The fact that you can cultivate it makes it more valuable, not less. It isn’t just a gift some people are born with. It’s a skill.
Where I part company with the secular version
The self-help version of gratitude is a technique. Useful, but ultimately hollow. Gratitude without a reference point, without something or someone you’re actually grateful to… it has a ceiling.
What grounds it for me is this: Jesus shows us two things. His grace, which is giving us what we don’t deserve. And his mercy, which is sparing us from what we do deserve. When you actually sit with that, the honest response is gratitude. Not as a technique. As recognition of what’s true.
And it doesn’t stop there. He doesn’t show us these things so the story ends with us. The call is to pass it on. Love me as I’ve loved you. Love your neighbour. Gratitude is meant to flow outward. It isn’t a private feeling. It’s an orientation.
The job I didn’t get
Earlier in my career there was a job I didn’t get. Head of customer service. I really wanted it, and when the answer was no, I spent two or three months in a tailspin.
Looking back now I can see what was actually going on. I’d built up this image of what the job would give me, and when it fell through I felt cheated. But I wasn’t cheated. I had a team I liked, work I was good at, and more opportunity than I appreciated at the time. What I’d been nursing wasn’t ambition. It was entitlement dressed up as disappointment. Those two things feel identical from the inside.
About Emily
This one is harder to write about. When Emily died… your godmother, Isaac. She was eighteen. She’d beaten cancer twice, and then caught a chest infection that her immune system couldn’t fight. I was on the edges of faith at the time, and my response was anger. At God. For taking her. For the unfairness of it.
Years later, I feel it entirely differently. I’m grateful she was here. Eighteen years of her in our lives. That’s not nothing. That’s extraordinary. That shift from anger to gratitude didn’t happen overnight. But it happened. And it’s one of the clearest things I can point to that shows what a practised gratitude can do with grief.
The thing I worry about for you
A comfortable life creates a real risk of entitlement. I have these things, therefore I deserve them, therefore I’m owed more. That mindset leads somewhere bad. A kind of low-grade victimhood where you feel like the world is constantly failing you. It’s corrosive, and it’s everywhere right now.
Perspective helps. Compared to almost any human being who ever lived, in almost any other time or place, you have an extraordinary amount. The country, the access, the safety, the life you were born into. It’s remarkable when you actually look at it.
Never feel you’re owed anything. Not for long, anyway. Catch yourself, and course-correct.
What I’m most grateful for
You, Isaac. You’re the biggest blessing in my life. I’m grateful for you every day.
And more broadly: my life, the gifts I’ve been given, and having my eyes opened to where those gifts are meant to go. I wasn’t always there. I spent years looking inward. I’m here now, or at least more here than I was, and that shift from self-absorption to purpose is something I hold with real gratitude.
One last thing
There are people who shaped me. Granddad, Nana, your mum.
People I haven’t told nearly enough. I tell Steph, but probably not enough even then. The others, far too rarely.
There’s a quote I keep coming back to: “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” That’s William Arthur Ward. He’s right. Gratitude that stays inside isn’t much use to anyone.
Tell people. Tell them while you can.
What the Bible says
Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.
— 1 Thessalonians 5:18
Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.
— Philippians 4:6
Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name.
— Psalm 100:4
Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights.
— James 1:17
Forward. Always forward.
Love, Dad.
