Thriving in Uncertainty;Cultivating Gratitude

Thriving in Uncertainty: Cultivate Gratitude for Our Interdependence

by Rabbi Rami Shapiro

Rabbi Rami explores how Naikan practice cultivates gratitude, revealing life’s interdependence to foster joy.

Life, as Genesis 1:1 tells us, is tohu va-vohu: wild and chaotic, a state of existential uncertainty that often leaves us feeling isolated, helpless, and adrift. When deeply felt and practiced, gratitude acts as an antidote to all this by revealing the interdependence of life in a manner that dismantles despair and alienation and invites joy and community.

Consider your lungs. They are essential for your survival, taking in oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide. However, they do not produce the oxygen necessary for your survival; trees and other green plants do that. Conversely, trees do not generate the carbon dioxide needed for their survival; you do that. You give each other the elements vital for mutual survival.

Recognizing this fosters gratitude toward trees and encourages behaviors that support their thriving. What is true about you and trees applies to everything. To paraphrase the apostle Paul, all life is a vast web of giving and receiving in which you live, move, and have your being (Acts 17:28). Gratitude arises naturally from realizing this truth.

Many years ago, I learned about gratitude and interdependence from an anonymous shoemaker at the Rockport Company. I had sent a pair of wingtip dress shoes to the factory for resoling. The refurbished shoes were returned with a handwritten note:

Dear Rabbi Shapiro,

We at Rockport take great pride in the quality of our shoes. However, the condition of your shoes suggests that you do not share this pride. The backs are cracked due to improper use, the leather is dry from insufficient cleaning and polishing, and the overall appearance of the shoes is untidy. I have done my best to repair your shoes, but on behalf of everyone who works hard to provide you with quality footwear, I wish you would take better care of them.

A cleaning kit, complete with polish and a brush, came along with the shoes and the note.

As I read the note, my relationship with my shoes changed. Even though I bought them with my money, I realized that “my money” depended on countless individuals, known and unknown, who prepared me for and provided me with a livelihood to earn that money. Moreover, the shoes I purchased resulted from numerous unnamed laborers and animals.

The more I reflected on all the lives involved in making, shipping, stocking, and selling these shoes to me, the more gratitude I felt toward them. This gratitude for my shoes awakened my sense of interconnectedness with and appreciation for the web of life.

Gratitude, Joy, and Inner Seeing

The power of gratitude to awaken you to the oneness of all things often acts as a catalyst for joy. Yet joy is personal and often private, whereas gratitude is interpersonal and often social. While gratitude may inspire joy, joy does not require the awakening of gratitude. As one fellow on a retreat told me, “My joy comes from being in solitude, unindebted to anyone or anything. That’s why I meditate alone in the woods.”

The absurdity of this assertion should be obvious. You can’t be alone, especially not in the woods, where the entirety of the cosmos conspires to support you. Nothing is truly alone. You can’t be a-lone because everything is all-one.

I cultivate gratitude through daily Naikan (“inner seeing”), a Japanese practice developed in the 1940s that I first learned from David Reynolds, Ph.D., who introduced the concept to the West in the 1970s. I continue to study with Gregg Krech and Linda Anderson at the ToDo Institute.

To follow the practice, every evening I reflect on the past 24 hours and ask myself three questions:

What did others do for me today?

What did I do for others today that was not self-benefiting?

What trouble did I cause others today?

If you’re like me, your daily Naikan will reveal two insights. First, none of your answers will be extraordinary; all that occurred involved ordinary people engaging in ordinary actions in ordinary ways. Second, what you received surpasses what you gave, and the troubles caused outnumber both.

For example, imagine you are rushing to catch an elevator as the door is closing. A stranger in the elevator holds the door open for you. Since you have no way of knowing what inner reward this stranger felt by doing so, their gift relates to question one: “What did people do for me today?”

You also can’t know the impact of this gift on the person’s life. Perhaps they were running late for an important meeting and holding the door cost that person precious time and may even have made them anxious. Therefore, you can add their gift to question three: “What trouble did I cause others today?”

If, however, you had held the elevator door open for someone else, you do know that it gave you pleasure, so you can’t give yourself credit and count it as a response to question two: “What did I do for others today that was not self-benefiting?”

Yes, the practice is rigged. You will always come up short. The universe is structured to offer you far more than you can give back. The goal isn’t to make you feel guilty but to help you realize your interconnectedness and experience gratitude.

Consider this story about my teacher, David Reynolds. David split his therapy practice between the United States and Japan. While in this country, he resided in a somewhat rundown neighborhood in Los Angeles, providing access to therapy for those who typically cannot afford it.

On one corner of his block stood a gas station, and beside it was a lot filled with trash. David decided to spend a Saturday cleaning up the lot to show his gratitude for his community. He shared his plans with the gas station owner, who agreed.

That Saturday, David walked to the lot wearing a pair of gardening gloves and carrying a pile of trash bags and then began picking up the litter. About 30 minutes into this backbreaking task, the owner of the gas station appeared with a broom handle fitted with a nail on one end. “Use this to pick up the papers,” the man said. “It will be easier on your back.”

David smiled appreciatively and took the broom handle. Inwardly, he felt disappointed. The whole idea of cleaning up the lot was to repay the neighborhood for being so kind to him. Now, he felt he was incurring a new debt to the gas station owner. Things went downhill from there.

The gas station owner reappeared. This time, he brought his own tool and began helping David clean the lot—making the job easier but increasing the debt. Then other neighbors noticed their efforts and came out to join them. People stepped in to help clean the lot, provided water and food for the workers, and hauled the trash away to a dumpster. The harder David worked to give to his neighbors, the more his neighbors worked to give to him in return.

Gratitude Is Doing, Not Feeling

This is how the world works when you practice Naikan: The more aware you are of the help you receive, the more you strive to give back; and the more you give back, the more help you attract.

It makes sense to be grateful for our shoes and our neighbors.

But what about all the endless horrors that haunt us and those we love? Are we expected to feel gratitude toward them as well?

I had a friend who was dying of cancer in his early 50s. He also practiced Naikan. I asked him about gratitude: “Am I grateful to my cancer? Of course not!” he responded. “I’m grateful for my wife and kids. I’m grateful for my job and coworkers. I’m grateful for my doctors and meds. I’m grateful for every day, but not for the cancer that has numbered them.”

This is important. You need not feel gratitude for cancer, for the drunk driver who slammed into your car and left you unable to walk, or for the terrible things that happen to you and those you love. You need not feel anything.

Naikan is about recognizing the interconnectedness of life and the giving and receiving that make life possible; it is about seeing rather than feeling.

When you recognize the truth that humans and other beings give to you throughout the day, you become inspired to give to others. It isn’t about feelings but about facts. Cultivating gratitude reveals the interconnectedness of life.

Acknowledging this interconnectedness leads to a way of living that maximizes the well-being of oneself and others, person and planet, us and them. (Not surprisingly, preliminary studies published earlier this year show that Naikan increases oxytocin, the bonding hormone, and reduces cortisol, the stress hormone.) We receive gifts from others until the moment of our death, and giving to others in return continues until our last breath leaves our bodies.

Cleansing the Lens of Distortion

We live in a time when millions view interconnectedness as heretical. Our era suffers from polarization, as individuals from various political, economic, social, or religious backgrounds believe there must be winners and losers, rich and poor, high caste and low, saved and damned.

Fear of the other overshadows gratitude for the other. Interdependence is perceived as a weakness. We view life through what Paul called a dark and distorting lens (1 Corinthians 13:12) that isolates us from the whole that is God and pits us against one another and nature in a war of all against all for dominance.

One way to cleanse this lens is to recognize that every life is an expression of divine life. In doing so, we can liberate ourselves from the illusion that poisons our relationships with one another and with the world. This liberation can be achieved by cultivating gratitude. I know of no better way to do that than through daily Naikan.

This article appeared in the September/October 2025 of Spirituality & Health®: