Good morning! Happiest of Mondays everyone. Sometimes Mondays tend to feel like the worst, and sometimes they actually are the worst. But regardless of how it feels or how it is, try and see it as a fresh start. It’s 120 hours from Monday to Friday, what will you do with those hours?

This week’s menu is a tasty one. Since Thanksgiving is featured on this week’s calendar, we’ll spend the week munching on gratitude. The importance of gratitude can often be overlooked, but this week we’re going to see what all the great thinkers have to say about it. Last week, we talked solely about St. Augustine and his inner journey. This week we’ll be branching out and hearing from Cicero, Aurelius, St. Paul, Epictetus, Aquinas, and even a few modern thinkers. So let’s dig in for Day One!

Today, for our main course, we'll start with the classical authority on gratitude: Cicero. We’ll also get into the psychology of gratitude to see what it does to our mind. To burn those calories, we’ll do a little alignment exercise. For dessert, we’ll munch on a beautiful passage from Gratitude by Oliver Sacks.

Enough talk, I’m starving. Thought Breakfast is served!

Let’s be real. The importance of gratitude is not a foreign concept to most people. However, from a philosophical lens, gratitude takes a whole different meaning. Here’s what Cicero has to say:

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.” - Cicero (Pro Plancio)

To Cicero, gratitude isn’t simply another virtue in Aristotle’s long list. Rather, gratitude is the source from which all other virtues flow. When gratitude is within your soul, it acts as fertile soil for generosity, patience, justice, humility, and joy.

Why is that? Why, out of all of the virtues, is gratitude the gateway to goodness?

Gratitude is the gateway because it orients the soul towards the good. Cicero throws a few examples out: Justice begins with recognizing the good others have done for you. Generosity begins with recognizing the good you’ve received but did not earn. Humility begins with recognizing the limits of your own power. Gratitude expands the scope of your awareness.

Gratitude trains your mind to notice the goodness in any other action. By noticing that goodness, your brain rewires your view of that goodness and ties it to the corresponding virtue.

Cicero says that an ungrateful person fundamentally cannot be virtuous because they’re blinded to what virtue grows out of; the acknowledgement of good outside of oneself.

Neurologically, this is called saliency. Your brain (by being grateful for something good) seeks more of the good, and recognizes it better.

Cicero intuited what psychology later confirmed; that humans have a negativity bias. We naturally scan for threats, flaws, losses, and uncertainty because it’s our primal instinct to keep ourselves safe. By experiencing gratitude, we become more salient towards the good things in life. This means that our brain literally rewires itself to place our attention on the good rather than the bad.

Gratitude directs our attention towards what is working, stable, supportive, and already enough.

Additionally, gratitude practices have been shown to increase baseline levels of dopamine and serotonin. This shows that gratitude is one of the few mental practices that chemically enhances joy in the brain.

Let’s try it out below👇 .

Ask yourself:

Think about these questions. If you want to write them in a journal to put your thoughts in front of you, go ahead. If you prefer to just reflect in your head, that’s more than okay. No matter how you go about it, reflecting on these questions is the perfect way to integrate what we just learned from Cicero into your life today.

Today, we’ll be reading a passage from Oliver Sack’s Gratitude to hammer down on this theme and set the tone for the rest of the week. This is a more modern echo of Cicero’s claim that virtue starts with gratitude. It’s about love given and received, awareness, and privilege.

Note: Sacks wrote this in his old age, reflecting on his fear of death but noting that this feeling of gratitude outweighed his fear of death.

As you read this short passage, keep in mind the importance of what you have, not what you lack:

“My predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.” - Oliver Sacks (Gratitude)

Think to yourself: What is one thing you’ve been given that you haven’t acknowledged as a privilege or adventure?

Munch on that for today. We’ve set the personal and psychological implications of gratitude, and we’ve laid the foundation for the rest of the week. I don’t know about you, but I’m excited to dig into this.

One thing I’m certainly grateful for is all of you who eat Thought Breakfast every day. Thank you all! And come back tomorrow for another steaming hot plate!

Thank you for reading along with us today! If you enjoy this content, and want to start your days grounded in thought and mindfulness, I suggest you have a seat at our table! Smash that button below to check out more editions and subscribe!

Remember to stay mindful, smell the flowers, and take it easy.

Chef Ricky - Thought Breakfast

P.S.

This is a developing project, we want your feedback! You might notice some style changes and content updates as we progress. Take the journey with us!