Gratitude isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s a must-have in expat life. Amidst the challenges of a new culture, a new routine, and a new language, gratitude can make all the difference. That’s why, with Thanksgiving approaching, I’m reflecting again on gratitude and its power to transform expat life.
Last year I focused more on the benefits of gratitude to your emotional health, but this year I want to explore something deeper: the connection between gratitude and character.
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Gratitude and Joy
No one will survive or thrive as an expat without joy. No one will survive or thrive as an expat without joy. Indeed, even in your passport culture, you won’t keep a job or thrive in a relationship without joy. Everyone seeks joy in their lives, yet we often ignore the pathway that runs from gratefulness to joy.
Consider, for a moment, the alternatives to living a life marked by gratitude: a life defined by ingratitude. Just that sentence should make it immediately apparent that an ungrateful life won’t be marked by joy.
Ingratitude and joy are mutually exclusive.
And even if it were possible to live a life marked by neither gratitude nor ingratitude—living a perfectly neutral life in all ways—it should be equally evident that a life of perfect neutrality would not lead to joy either.
The path to joy starts with gratitude for the blessing of your life.
If you struggle to be joyful, start by being grateful.
Gratitude and Peace
The world over, people long to have lives marked by peace—in your home, peace between countries, and peace in your relationships. Like joy or love, it’s taken for granted the world over that a good life is filled by peace rather than conflict, by wholeness rather than fracture, and by calm rather than chaos.
Yet how do we get the peace that we long for? That’s a far more complex topic than a single blog post, but allow me to suggest that gratitude is a key component of a path towards peace. Or, perhaps it’s better put negatively: if you’re not grateful, you’ll never have peace.
Think of why you may break peace—for now, think just of a personal relationship where you decide to break peace or where someone breaks peace with you. Isn’t there almost always some bit of discontent that causes the break in peace? On the other hand, if you have a life marked by gratitude and express that gratitude to another person, then isn’t there peace in the relationship even if you have to have a “tough love” conversation with another person?
I think a major reason for the connection between gratitude and peace is that gratitude ensures you do not reduce a person to the sum total of their failures. If, when you think of a person, all you can think about—or all they can think about when they consider you—are failures and mistakes, then you won’t have peace. If, however, you at least balance out the weakness of another person with gratitude for their giftedness, you’ll be far more likely to have peace.
Struggling with peaceful relationships? Before you see that person who irks you, reflect on their good qualities and be grateful for them. Take it a step further: express that gratefulness to the other person and see how it transforms even fraught relationships to ones of peace.
Gratitude and Patience
Most people worldwide recognize that patience is a virtue; similarly, people everywhere complain when others are impatient with them.1 Though praising patience is common all over the world, I’ve never heard someone reflect on the connection between gratefulness and patience. It seems apparent, though, that the more grateful you are, the more patient you’ll be able to be with others or in a situation.
Impatient at a red light? Be grateful that you have a means of transportation. There are hundreds of millions of people the world over who would love to have the inconvenience of a 90 second wait at a traffic light rather than plodding miles on foot. Given the choice, you would make the same choice, so be grateful.
Impatient with a coworker or colleague? Be grateful that you have work that pays you. Tens of millions of people don’t, and hundreds of millions more have a job that is markedly worse than yours. It’s easy to be frustrated at others and with behavior that is annoying—but rather than consider that behavior in a vacuum, be grateful for the good that comes with the bad.
Impatient with the behavior of your spouse? I’ll always remember my friend’s words after his wife initiated a nasty divorce, “I wish I had a spouse who annoyed me.” For all the pain of his quite difficult marriage, when his wife insisted that it end, he wished that he had it back, with all the pain involved. Be grateful that you have a spouse who annoys you; if they died, you would miss the things that annoy you now.
Impatient with your host culture? I get it—but if you cultivate gratitude for the good parts of the culture you experience, you’ll be able to be patient with the annoyances and the bad. That’s simple to say, of course, and I’ve written extensively on cross-cultural living, but most of what I’ve written can be simplified to just this idea of gratitude.
The reason that gratitude and patience are connected is that it is nearly impossible to be patient when all you experience is evil or bad. Nothing we experience, though, is completely evil or entirely bad—at a minimum, the fact that we exist to judge it as good or bad means there is at least some good even in the worst situation! By remembering and being grateful for the good in a situation, it makes it easier and worthwhile to endure the bad in order to realize the good.
Struggle with impatience? Try cultivating gratitude.
Gratitude and Love
“All you need is love” is not just a Western notion, though it’s certainly expressed more in the West than in other cultures. Beneath the sentimental platitudes and warm feelings, though, is a deep need to feel loved and the knowledge that conflicts are rooted in a failure of people to love one another.
Again, developing a heart of love is a far more complex and deeper topic than I would attempt to address in a simple blog post, but there is a connection between love and gratitude that is worthy of reflection. The idea is simple, here, though the implications are massive: the more grateful you are for a person or situation, the easier it is to love that person or to act lovingly in that situation.
Love is fueled by gratitude.
Now, if you only love people because you’re grateful for the benefits they bring you, that’s not a pure form of love. It’s actually a kind of self-centeredness which I would see as the opposite of love. Love based solely on gratitude won’t ever produce the kind of love that can extend even to one’s enemies, so don’t make gratitude the sole foundation of your love.
And yet, the greater our gratitude, the easier it is to love. Perhaps that’s simply because, at root, we’re selfish creatures whose love starts as a self-centered love before it can grow into others-centered love. Regardless of why, though, gratitude fuels love.
The greater our gratitude, the easier it is to love.
If you’re struggling to love, start with gratitude.
Cultivating Gratitude
Gratitude does not happen automatically, it must be intentionally cultivated. It seems our default as human beings is to be ungrateful for what we have, greedily or enviously pursuing more and more rather than being content and grateful for what we have. As such, it takes intentional effort to grow in gratitude and into the character that gratitude enables.
How do you intentionally cultivate gratitude?
Identify your gratitude
The first part of cultivating gratitude is identifying the things for which you are grateful. But rather than suggest you just “count your blessings,” here’s a thought exercise for you.
There are approximately 8.2 billion people on the planet earth. That number is hard to get your head around, so think about it this way. If you took an Olympic-sized swimming pool and filled it with marbles, it would hold just about 8.2 billion marbles.2 So, pour in 8.2 billion marbles representing the lives of everyone on earth and mix them together.
So here’s the question: If you could pick a marble at random and trade lives with that person, would you?
Would you trade lives with a random person in the world?
Your gut reaction to that question will reveal a lot about how grateful you are for your life. Sure, there may be people that you think are more fortunate than you—there may be a lot of people, in fact, who have “better lives” than you. It’s easy to compare yourself to others that you regard as better and so be ungrateful.
But if you could trade your life by sheer dumb luck with a random person on the planet, I bet very few of you would take that chance. You know you have a lot to be grateful for.
This is why, perhaps, that the movie It’s a Wonderful Life is such a beloved, classic movie despite being nearly 80 years old. It perfectly demonstrates how much there is to be grateful for, even in the most “ordinary” of lives.
There are many situations in our lives that are bad and so it can be a struggle in those situations to be grateful. But the marble-pool example and It’s a Wonderful Life demonstrate that you can be grateful in any situation, even if you are not grateful for any situation.3
So what are the things that you are unwilling to risk in the marble-in-the-pool exercise? Cultivate gratitude for these things. Write them down, share them with your family and friends, or journal about them.4
Habitualize and record your gratitude
It’s not enough to just know you are grateful and even to express that gratitude to others. To really grow in gratitude, record it. You can do this in a journal or in a notebook and that’s a wonderful thing, but the more public your record, the better. I know of one couple that daily wrote down one thing about their spouse that they were thankful for and the result transformed their marriage.
Make gratitude a habit and keep a record of it. You’ll be amazed by the cumulative effect of years of gratitude.
Every year at Thanksgiving, my family follows a tradition my father started: we write on a plastic piece of fruit the things for which we are grateful that year. I have 20+ pieces of fruit that form my record of gratitude over the years. When I read them every year at Thanksgiving, I’m almost always in tears as I am reminded of the sheer blessings of my life, not just at this moment, but in the record of 20+ years of fruit.
Maybe you don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, and that’s okay—but do make gratitude a habit for yourself and your family. Record it. Memorialize it. Review it.
Conclusion
Gratitude is more than just a fleeting emotion or what you say you feel when you get a pair of socks you didn’t really want. Gratitude can transform your character, relationships, and outlook on life. As expats, the challenges of living away from familiar comforts can sometimes cloud our ability to see the good around us. Intentionally cultivating gratitude, though, creates pathways to joy, peace, patience, and even love. Those are not just character traits you value, they’re crucial for surviving and thriving as an expat.
You have much to be grateful for, and while each individual blessing may feel small, the cumulative effect is immense when you cultivate it, record it, and review it. Wherever you are in your expat journey, cultivate gratitude to transform your life, one blessing at a time.
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Footnotes
- It is interesting to note that, though people the world over value patience, that cultural value gets expressed in radically different ways. In some cultures, waiting one minute for another person “justifies” impatience at the wait; in other places, people may wait a week before aggravation is “justified.” Some cultures place a much higher value on patience than others. This was a fascinating element to observe during the pandemic, as people in some cultures started protesting after days or weeks of restrictions, while others endured months or even years before breaking out in protests. Some cultures really are more patient than others. ↩︎
- For you nerds: An Olympic pool is 50 meters x 25 meters and is filled with a minimum of 2 meters of water, making its total volume 2,500 m³. Marbles are approximately 0.3 cm³ in volume, so 8.2 billion is a volume of 2,460 cm³, just about filling the pool. ↩︎
- This is part of what I was thinking about when I wrote Frame of Mind a few weeks ago with the curious subtitle “Your Perspective Matters More Than Your Problems. No matter your situation, you can be grateful in it, and reframing can be one helpful technique to help you recognize the basis for such gratitude. ↩︎
- For some practical tips for practicing gratitude, see The Art of Gratitude: An Expat’s Journey to Joy. ↩︎
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