When I started on a path to a more grateful life, I never imagined that the journey would lead to reconsidering ethics and politics, yet it seems somewhat inevitable now. Politics is about the way we structure life together. Gratitude is about mutuality, gifts, and caring, about how we give and receive, about benefactors, benefits, and beneficiaries, and about how we respond to all of that. Whether we recognize it or not, gratitude is necessary to our common life. And politics is how we organize that life. We carry around assumptions about gifts and gratitude. Those assumptions are too often invisible to us, yet they form the deep structure of our communities.
from “Grateful” by Diana Butler Bass