What I Didn't Know About Gratitude

The 15 minutes that changed everything

Photo by Rhiannon Elliott on Unsplash

Five hours, fifty nine minutes and forty four seconds. That is the amount of time I spent on the phone with Alaska Airlines yesterday.

There are so many ways I could be angry about this. But I've been practicing gratitude with a friend lately and I think it's working.

Because mostly I feel, wait for it. Grateful.

Grateful I read the whole confirmation email which started with my original booking. Because at first glance, everything looked fine, but then I scrolled down and there was an updated booking tucked in there that said instead of flying direct from Austin to San Francisco two days from now, I was flying from Austin to San Diego to San Jose. I don't know how well you know your California geography, but San Jose, while close-ish to San Francisco, is a totally different city. 

Grateful I called in when I did, at around 1 p.m., and decided to stay on hold even though the recording said the average wait time was two and a half hours. 

Grateful that after five hours on hold (I was doing other things, but at half mast, because I was, after that many hours, a little afraid of hanging up my phone or getting disconnected) I called Expedia, through which I'd booked the original flights and got through to a person.

Grateful that after 45 minutes of talking to Mason at Expedia, Raymond from Alaska finally picked up. 

Grateful that my husband was home and available to talk to Raymond while I kept talking to Marcus. See, there weren't many other flights, as mine had been completely canceled due to the little grounded-planes issue over at Alaska Air. Also, I refuse to catch a plane before 8 a.m. I'm at an age where it takes me days to recover from lack of sleep and I'm just not willing anymore. 

Grateful that Raymond could get me on the same flight as Marcus, but for free instead of the $109 Marcus insisted he had to charge me. Marcus had a bit of an attitude.

It's a bit like magic, practicing gratitude. You hear Oprah talk about it and her gratitude journal that she kept and then didn't keep and is now keeping again. 

Most of the spiritual gurus talk about it, Louis Hay was a big fan, Abraham Hicks too.

They all say something similar though about gratitude that I just couldn't put into practice. They kept talking about being grateful for things that haven't happened yet. The things you want in your life that you don't yet have. They talk about it like making a memory in advance, because your brain doesn't know the difference between reality and a memory – that part I get, it was being grateful for something I wanted but that didn't yet exist in my life that escaped me. I tried it yesterday though. Mostly instead of worrying, I tried thinking that I was going to get a flight to SFO and that everything would work out. 

I have kept gratitude journals in the past and had a thing where I texted a friend each day with three things I was grateful for. And it felt good in the moment. But no big shifts happened, nothing seemed greatly changed, internally or externally.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I listened to a video by Joe Dispenza. I've only ever listened to the one, but that's how it is sometimes, you get exactly what you need on the first try.

I think this video may have changed my life. 

In it, Mr. Dispenza talks about a study where people meditated on gratitude for 20 minutes, three times a day for four days in a row. I don't know how big a group this was, was it a good sample size? Was there diversity among participants? Was there just one person? Usually I care, but this time I didn’t. Even if it was just one person, something about this struck home. 

Dispenza says, "Our data shows that you take someone and do that [meditate on gratitude] for four days, three times a day, they make an immunoglobulin called Immunoglobulin A. It's your body's natural flu shot. It's the greatest immune chemical we have. Fifty percent increase in the subjects we studied in four days. Immunoglobulin A up 50% in four days. Where is that chemistry coming from? It's coming from within."

We all know how it feels, when we are in spontaneous gratitude. We're a combination of joyful, excited, relieved, hopeful, optimistic, heartfelt. We feel kindness towards ourselves, other people and the world at large. We feel like we could take on anything and that everything is truly, deeply okay. 

And it lasts about five seconds. Then our monkey minds kick in and we start thinking, thinking, thinking again. But for those brief seconds, we're in alignment with ourselves and the universe. 

After listening to the video, I started sitting in gratitude. Not for 20 minutes, not three times a day, I can't manage that, but I can sit for 15 minutes, once a day. And I tried remembering to slow down and just give a little thanks when something lovely comes my way.

People, something is happening. I have more patience now and it's not always been my strong suit—ask anyone, especially a certain friend who went to college with me and now lives in San Diego, not naming names. I'm grateful throughout the day for little things without even trying. Synchronicities are happening all over the place. 

And the biggest thing: I think I'm getting the hang of future gratitude.

I was standing at my kitchen window, looking out across my backyard to the open space and the pond, and three ducks took off from the water and flew right over my house, silhouetted against a cloud by the late afternoon light. I love birds, so that delighted me, and I thought, “Wow, I didn’t expect that,” and then I thought, "I am so grateful for all the wonderful things I don't even know are going to happen yet." Future gratitude in practice.

The hold music on Alaska Airlines will drive you mad. It's a loop of two different bad muzak club-mixes that play for about 10 seconds each. Endlessly. Let me be clear here, just because I've been practicing gratitude and have upped my patience bar by 100%, I wasn't a beacon of calm for the whole four hours, 53 minutes and 15 seconds before Raymond picked up. 

At one point I screamed in frustration, banged on my computer keys, slammed my computer shut and thought about throwing it out the window. But the lamp, my monitor and my husband were in the way. So I screamed again. 

While unseemly, screaming serves a purpose. I felt much calmer afterwards. Also humbled, as I crawled around on my floor looking for the G key that had flown off in my tantrum. It's loose all the time now, ever since it, and its next door neighbor F, stopped working and my husband and I watched a video on how to pop the top of the key off and clean underneath. It worked great for F, but G suffered in the process and the top now stays on only for brief moments when I'm not typing. In case anyone has forgotten, I type for a living. 

And, since you're wondering, I haven’t gotten a new computer because I will run this one to the ground before I subject myself to new technology and getting used to a new laptop, let's not even mention Windows 11. Also, it's wasteful. Only one letter is broken and the rest work perfectly well. It's one of the most frequently used letters, but that's fine. It's all just fine over here.

Mostly because I'm grateful. 

Before Raymond came into my life, Marcus had offered me a 6 a.m. flight, like he was handing me a prize. He asked if he could go ahead and book that for me and I said, "No." 

He paused and said, "No? Why not? Why can't I book you on that flight? You cannot get on that flight?" And I said, "No. I won't get on a flight that early." He exhaled loudly and said, "Well, what time DO you want to leave then?" 

Marcus and I were talking on my husband's phone, while mine was patiently sitting there on speakerphone playing its mind-bending hold mix as low as I could make it go and still be able to detect a change in the onslaught of sound.

I am one of those people who cannot listen to music while talking to someone, or talk on the phone while someone else tries to talk to me, or listen to someone talk while watching TV. I can't do two simultaneous inputs. It makes me aggravated and anxious. 

So I'm on the speakerphone with Marcus, the Alaska hold music is playing on my desk, there is loud music in Marcus's background, I am holding my shit together, and then the hold music on my phone stops. Someone is there. 

Marcus is telling me how he’s trying to help me (some kind of help is the kind of help we all can do without) and my Alaska call finally gets picked up. I was paralyzed. I didn't know what to do and I almost hung up on the Alaska rep because I was so overwhelmed.

My brain couldn't process the two conversations and Marcus was still talking at me. But then, something new happened. I just started talking to them both, on speaker phone. I said something like, "Hey I've got Expedia here and Alaska here and I need both of you to hold on a sec." And then I stood up and went to my husband and asked him to keep the Alaska rep, whose name I didn't know yet, on the line. Then I shoved my piece of scratch paper with the confirmation number on it in his hand and went back to my office. For the next 30 minutes I kept talking to Marcus while Raymond and my husband booked me on the only flight left to SFO this Thursday—for no extra fee. 

Let's review. Because these things that I did seem pretty banal. But to me, they are huge. I stayed calm under, what is to me, serious stress and pressure. Under that pressure, I said no. I asked for what I wanted and instead of retreating, quitting, just turning the whole thing off, I reached out for help.  

This has been happening more and more since I started practicing what I’m calling radical gratitude. 

Yes the practice has complex chemical and hormonal reactions inside our brains. Yes it makes us feel good when we do it. And from my own little test group of one, it also creates space, grounding, confidence. There's something internal that's driving the bus now and it's different than before. It's a part of me that knows it's okay to speak up, to ask for help, to ask for what I want.

I have a girlfriend who moved to Europe recently. She and I talk a lot about relationships and how to get what we need. Both of us tend towards isolating ourselves when we are triggered or hurt or angry, when what we most want is comfort, someone to give us solace. But we are terrified to ask. Except lately, we've both been asking. For what we need, for what we want, from our partners, our friends, people on the other end of the phone, waiters, business partners, clients. 

And we've both been practicing radical gratitude. For what we have now and what we don't yet know is coming.

What I haven’t seen all the gurus and scientists and researchers talking about is the connection between gratitude and self agency, and my limited research shows they are directly proportional to each other. They are also foundational to how much we can love ourselves, how much we are willing to go to bat for ourselves, and how much we belong to ourselves.

Because gratitude is a form of giving thanks for how our choices got us where we are. And if we're grateful for where our choices got us and will get us, we cannot at the same time be berating ourselves for those same choices. 

Gratitude as freedom to love ourselves just as we are. 

As Dr. Joe says, that chemistry is coming from within.