Be Grateful... Someone Else Wants What You Have!
Years ago when my voice teacher learned that I was singing John Rutter’s “Gloria” with The Reston Chorale, he asked me to sing it with his church choir. I was honored to have been asked and jumped at the chance!1
I entered the church choir rehearsals with gratitude and joy. It was Christmastime and the church was already beautifully decorated in anticipation of the Christmas Eve services. The setting and experience was magical.
As is common for church and community choirs, a professional singer was hired for the more difficult solo parts of the piece. Because I aspired to be a soloist myself, I was anxious to hear the soloist and to see how she approached the solos.
Her voice was beautiful and she definitely had the chops for the piece. But what I noticed in rehearsal left me scratching my head a bit.
When this soloist walked into her first rehearsal with the choir, she literally dragged herself to her seat. She had a frown on her face that lasted until the end of rehearsal. “I guess she’s having a bad day,” I thought.
But she wasn’t just having one bad day. At every rehearsal, she dragged herself to the stage with a sour face. She sang beautifully each time, but her demeanor left me disappointed. How could she be so downtrodden when she was so fortunate to have that lovely voice and this opportunity?
I am making some assumptions here, I realize, and since I don’t know her story, there might be a very good reason why she seemed so downtrodden during rehearsals. Still, I watched her with envy, wishing I’d had that same opportunity.
I wrote off the experience, assuming that she was going through a rough patch or just had a dour disposition until I noticed the same thing with another professional musician, this time a pianist. Again, I couldn’t wrap my head around how someone who is (I am assuming, of course) living their dream.2
Again, I’m making assumptions about the person so I am willing to concede that there could be a story behind both of these ladies’ sad faces and perhaps they regained the joy in their work that they’d presumably had at some point. But even if they were simply going through a rough patch, we can learn something from my observation.
Somehow along the way, these two women had lost the joy which drove them to become professional musicians. Whatever their circumstance, they had lost sight of their blessings (even if only temporarily) and couldn’t realize the underlying bliss of these blessings.
I assumed that this phenomenon was unique to musicians and singers (because I saw it so frequently among that group). That is, until I saw a similar response in myself in an area unrelated to music.
I chose my career as a software engineer with great expectation, but I’d barely begun my first job when I began wondering if I’d made the wrong career choice. There were many reasons for my doubts, but, sadly, I spent most of my career exploring the possibility of other careers rather than enjoying the one I had. In the process, I didn’t live fully in the career that I had already chosen.
After I retired from my career as a software engineer, I met a lot of folks who were envious of my skillset. Some of them were out of work and some just disliked their current job, but all of them would have traded places with me in an instant if it were possible for me to give them my hard-earned skills and knowledge.
I contemplated the reactions of these folks as I thought about how truly fortunate I was to have had the career that I did. Software engineering wasn’t always fun for me, but I experienced some really fun parts, such as watching a piece of code take shape like a piece of artwork.
I was paid well and even though some of my jobs were mundane, I didn’t work tons of hours so I had time for my hobbies, like singing. My career afforded me other opportunities, too, like traveling through Europe, living in my dream house for a time, and taking voice lessons without going into debt.
Was I being ungrateful, just as I had accused these other women of being? The details were different, but the sour face and absence of gratitude was the same.
After it sunk in that I had something that many people envied, I knew that I had to reframe my thoughts about my career. I began to focus on all the ways my career had given me not just a way to make a living but also had given me an excellent life overall.
Coming from a poor upbringing, I perhaps appreciated more than most the value of the jobs that kept me from worrying about where my next meal would come from. I’d met interesting people in my jobs and I’d gotten to try lots of different tasks besides just coding.
In my 26 year career, I got to experience the joy of technical writing, I actually enjoyed attending meetings, and I discovered quite accidentally that I enjoyed giving presentations to my bosses and customers. Looking back, I can see that there were plenty of fun times alongside the mundane.
Perhaps it’s not true of every career nor of every blessing we have in life, but noticing that others would delight in what we already have can bring a new perspective and offer us a fresh way to explore gratitude for what we have.
Today I appreciate my career more than I did when I was in the midst of doing it. But I also realize that I missed a significant opportunity for joy by not being as grateful as I could have been about my work. While I now have plenty of gratitude for what once was, the relevant lesson is that I don’t repeat the same taking-for-granted of my current blessings.
What do you have that someone else would envy? Do you have a steady paycheck, a loving family, a cherished hobby? Are you resilient, creative, or ambitious? Are you logical, empathetic, or resourceful?
Sometimes we fail to be grateful for what we have until we observe our blessings from someone else’s viewpoint. We often compare ourselves to those who have something we want and find ourselves lacking, but from a happiness standpoint, we would be better off comparing ourselves to those who don’t have what we already have.
Take some time today to think about the blessings you have that others would appreciate. Perhaps you’ll consider tangible things like food, shelter, and a job. You might also, like me, consider skills that come easily (like writing about happiness is for me) or that you’ve worked hard to learn and hone (like software engineering was for me). Finally, never take for granted your family, friends, and community.
Finding gratitude in what others might envy isn’t about comparing ourselves to those who are less fortunate — even if that’s how we need to approach it at first. The true benefit in observing our blessings from someone else’s perspective is that it brings us a new way of experiencing our blessings.
We can easily take for granted that which we have, that which comes easy to us, or that which we’ve become familiar with. When we step out of our routine vantage point, we can begin to observe how truly blessed we are. It’s another way to get out of our heads and into our hearts, finding gratitude in unexpected places.
If you don’t know who John Rutter is, you should! His work is stunningly beautiful in ways that I can’t begin to describe. Two of my favorite compositions of his are “The Lord is My Shepherd” and “Candlelight Carol.”
I later learned that not all musicians love their jobs. A friend of mine was forced to learn to play the piano and the experience was so disheartening to her that she actually disliked her hard-earned skill and found little joy in her work.