The horrors and delights of contrast make us grateful.

Plato said that excellence, arete, is knowledge of the good life and how to live it. Well, my community college philosophy teacher had paraphrased this when I was 16, but you get the picture. However, I would absolutely say that true knowledge of the good life is also awareness of the good (and the bad) life. Abraham Hicks speaks about this very accurately. Without contrast, we humans simply do not know what is good for us.

If life has always functioned smoothly, if our needs have always been met without issue, if systems have always worked without a hitch, then there is nothing for the body to compare against, and gratitude can therefore feel difficult to achieve or embody.

Some people do go their entire lives without experiencing severe contrast. I know a few of these people. They are exceptionally lucky, and perhaps that is their own personal decision and karma, to have chosen a life of ease. However, most often, people…at some point in their lives, sometimes after experiencing an enormous amount of ease…will experience an upset, whether through health or otherwise. This is not a result of spiritual shortcomings, but again, part of their plan.

I was thinking about Australia as a clear example of this. Australia is an environmental and social welfare paradise. It is a country where space, safety, clean air, nature, and relative abundance are normalised, where life can absolutely be lived with a level of ease that many people elsewhere never experience. This does not apply to Aboriginal people, and I want to make that clear. But for around 95 percent of the population, this is very much the reality, and I say that with full certainty after living there for a third of my life spent between Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney.

Many people born and raised there take short trips abroad, often to places like Bali, returning home entirely unchanged, not because they lack appreciation as individuals, but because they have never known anything materially or structurally different. Any sense of poverty in Southeast Asia can simply be dismissed as a non-reality to them, when in fact Australia itself is the non-reality.

I am deeply grateful for everything Australia gave me and for the level of extreme ease it provided after twenty four years of chronic difficulty, socially, personally, and familially in America. It did not feel real at all.

People who arrive in Australia from elsewhere feel it immediately. The quiet. The space. The absence of pressure. The abundance of money. The way life does not require very much from people. There is no relentless vigilance like you experience in America. There is no extreme wealth consciousness like you experience in the UK. Everything is relatively flat. The social system is abundant and generous. There is very little hierarchy. You speak to your boss as if he is a friend. If you want to go on holiday, you simply say you want to go on holiday, and 99 percent of the time it is approved. You can even say this during a job interview. In America, if you did this, you would not get the job. You would be seen as lazy for even thinking about holidays while applying for work. It is an entirely different planet. People who move to Australia tend to love it because they know what it is like to live in places with real hardship, difficulty, and everyday trauma.

In America, most people I know juggle three jobs and still struggle to survive. They work eighty hours a week or more and still cannot afford to comfortable feed and house their families without worrying about whether they can continuously afford the basics. People are pushed to extreme measures just to live, which is why America is such an extreme country in so many ways.

I know a handful of Australians who are genuinely grateful despite being born and raised there, but they tend to be the spiritual ones. I cannot think of a single non-spiritual Australian I know who has a lived sense of gratitude. What I often observe instead is complacency, boredom, and apathy, and that is a frightening thing.

Coming back to Rome from Zurich, I was reminded of all of this while sitting on the plane. I looked around at the faces, flat, irritated, annoyed by delays and speed, and I thought about how extraordinary the situation actually was. Every person in that cabin had either just come from or was about to go on holiday. We had paid to cross borders in a matter of hours. Even a budget flight is still a flight.

If we were still travelling by horse drawn carriage, stepping onto a plane would produce awe. It would be felt in the body. Speed and access have erased wonder, not because they are wrong, but because contrast has been removed.

This exists everywhere in daily life. A hot shower is only fully felt after cold water. Silence is different after noise. Rest feels real only after exhaustion. Safety is understood only after fear.

When life has included difficulty, ease registers somatically and viscerally. Gratitude is not a concept or a practice. It shows up in the body, the mind, and the soul. You feel the difference because your body remembers the alternative.

This is why I believe those of us trying to build better lives must stay humble and allow ourselves to remember where we came from. I sometimes forget. I came from extreme hardship when I was young, and when I’m not being embodied myself, I like to put it in a box and throw a nice thick nvisibility cloak over the top. But it is in those moments of remembering that I think, holy shit, how incredible where I am now.

I encourage everyone to do the same. Remember the contrast of your life, because in the end it’s all beautiful, because it’s part of the ornate tapestry of human experience.