Most of us wouldn’t say we were thankful for breathing. It’s one of those things we take for granted until something goes wrong, but considering the millions of events happening, all of it without our knowledge and none of it under our control, perhaps we should be.
Thankfulness can be a funny thing. There are moments when we find ourselves exceedingly thankful for something, from the unexpected kindness of a stranger to the much needed compassion of a friend. We tend to know these as we experience them, something inside of us struck by what someone else has done on our behalf. The feeling can be moving, powerful, touching, making it about more than merely being thankful, something closer to the recognition of our shared humanity.
As a result of these moments, bonds can be formed between friends and family members, strangers can become friends, and even if we never see the person again, a lasting memory can be formed. How many of us have told a years’ old story about that one stranger at the airport who helped us get where we needed to be or the person who took a moment to stop when we were on the side of the road and at least asked if help was on the way? There are lesser versions of this moment to varying degrees, of course. Those of us who at least try to be polite claim we’re thankful several times per day, perhaps even more, but how frequently do we really mean it? This isn’t to suggest that we shouldn’t say it simply to be polite. The entire world runs a lot more smoothly when people observe the bare minimum of decorum in public, but I doubt many are truly thankful that the barista at Starbucks successfully hands you an almost $10 coffee or the cashier at the supermarket scans your items without personally insulting you or tried to rip you off, at least not in any meaningful way. Instead of truly thanking the person for helping us, we are really thanking them for not wasting our time, moving us along quickly without messing anything up, and being reasonably polite themselves. Both the more touching moments and the simply polite ones also have an inverse side, when we are enraged or frustrated because our needs or expectations aren’t met, but interestingly, the strength of our reaction isn’t necessarily proportional to the initial magnitude. In many cases, we might become angrier with the store clerk whose job it is to help us than the friend who doesn’t put in the extra, somewhat unexpected effort. How many times have you gotten yourself into a high dudgeon because someone making minimum wage in some corporate sweatshop, where they likely couldn’t do anything even if they wanted to, failed to assist you as either you expected or felt you deserved? Conversely, how many times have you let some small slight slide right on by for a close friend or a family member, figuring it’s not worth jeopardizing the relationship? Sometimes, of course you don’t, and relationships can be severed as a result, family and friends split apart forever or something that was largely meaningless, but have you ever wondered why there’s a difference between the two reactions and the role expectations play in your level of anger or frustration?
Me, neither, and yet it is as likely true for you as it is for me. Most of us give the strong relationships in our life the benefit of the doubt, within reason, and ironically enough, even when some may be much quicker to anger at loved ones than strangers. Those that do not are frequently loners, unable to maintain long term relationships. At the same time, there’s little doubt that our expectations frequently dictate the intensity of our reactions. When we expect nothing, getting anything is a pleasant surprise. When we expect everything, settling on even a little less can have an outsize unpleasantness. According to the National Institutes of Health, “Psychological studies have demonstrated an important role for expectations on judgments and decisions. These studies have shown that different features, such as brands, pricing, and emotions, can impact expectations, which in turn can alter people’s behavior.” While they don’t cite any studies specifically on the subject of thankfulness, there are certainly some parallels. Expectations about everything from vacations to movies influence how we evaluate the experience. For example, “Two studies explored the extent to which prior affective expectations shape people’s evaluations of experiences and decisions about repeating those experiences. Study 1 found that students’ prior expectations about an upcoming vacation accounted for a significant portion of the variance in their post-vacation evaluations, as did students’ recall of specific experiences. In Study 2, both prior expectations and actual experiences of watching a movie were manipulated in a 2 × 2 design. People’s affective expectations made more of a difference than the objective experience when assessing people’s willingness to participate in the study again. A reinterpretation hypothesis—that people discount or reweigh memories of expectation-inconsistent events—accounted for the results of these studies better than a selective memory or initial effects hypothesis.” Expectations can also influence how we value a product. In one study, participants who paid full price for an energy drink claimed they received a more substantial benefit than those who paid less. Perhaps even more interestingly, our expectations can be influenced by the perceived emotions and their knowledge of the people we are interacting with. We gravitate towards and are even willing to pay more in negotiations with someone we believe has a positive attitude. Similarly, “In the field of neuroeconomics, Delgado et al. has shown that in classic economic games, such as the Trust Game, decisions are influenced by prior knowledge about one’s partner. Here, before interacting with others, participants were provided with information about the personality of these partners. Results indicated that this did indeed have a bearing on how the participants made decisions about the partner, namely, if the player was a ‘good’ person, then bad game behavior was more readily forgiven. Thus, these findings show that prior social knowledge about a particular partner can influence learning from actual observed behavior, showing a clear ‘top-down’ influence on social decision making.”
Expectations, necessarily, lead to the notion that there are many things, both personally and in our interactions with others that we simply take for granted, whether or not we really should. This category includes the very air we breathe because, if you really stop to consider the complexity underlying each and every breath we take, it’s a wonder it works at all, much less 20,000 to 25,000 times per day without fail for an average life span of almost eighty years. Five sets of muscles are required simply to inhale and exhale, the diaphragm, rib muscles, abdominal muscles, face, mouth, and larynx muscles, plus muscles in the neck and collarbone, none of which are under conscious control. Instead, these muscles are controlled by around 10,000 neurons in the brainstem, known as the preBötzinger Complex (preBötC). In addition to the contractions required to inhale and exhale, neurons control the rhythm and pace of our breathing, monitor potential irritants, carbon dioxide and oxygen levels in the blood, and more. Successfully completing an inhale or an exhale is, of course, only part of what it takes to breathe, vital but not the whole story by any means. In the lungs themselves, your blood captures oxygen and releases carbon dioxide, a process that occurs in incredibly complex, nested structures where the bronchial tubes divide into bronchioles and then down into alveoli. For this to work, blood needs to be continually pumped through your circulatory system, powered by a single organ, the heart, that beats between 60 to 100 times per minute every minute you’re alive, from your first to your last, once again not under anything resembling conscious control. The heart itself is technically one big muscle, though it is a special kind of muscle not present in the rest of the body, arranged in a complicated network of four chambers. There are around 40,000 neurons in the heart alone, what is sometimes described as a “little brain,” more technically known as the “intrinsic nervous system,” which is controlled by another 4,000 to 5,000 in the brain proper. The combination of the heart’s muscle power and these elegant control mechanisms allows it to pump blood through an incredible 60,000 miles of veins, arteries, and blood vessels, twice the circumference of the Earth in an adult. As Leonardo Da Vinci was the first to realize, this network and the heart itself takes advantage of the physics of fluid dynamics and pressure in sometimes surprising ways. Incredibly, many of the valves in the heart are not directly controlled by muscular activity. Rather, the motions of the blood create currents and changes in pressure that do so, meaning we are all of us alive right now because of the very same impersonal, inorganic principles that dictate how water swirls in a river.
Forget under conscious control. It’s not under any control at all, save that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, nor is this the only science that just happens in our body. The same could be said of the chemical reactions that the act of breathing facilitates, the reactions that actually keep us alive. We could pull all the air into our lungs that we like, an entire atmosphere of it, pump all the blood of the oceans through our bodies, but breathing still wouldn’t work if certain molecules didn’t interact with certain other molecules in very specific, exceedingly consistent, and incredibly complex ways. Blood passing through the lungs picks up oxygen because a molecule of hemoglobin mounted to our red blood cells contains iron, and iron reacts with oxygen as anyone who’s seen a rusty nail can attest. Hemoglobin is a protein with four subunits, each with one polypeptide chain and corresponding hemo group, composed of almost 300 individual amino acids in a structure that looks more detailed than most buildings or works of modern art. The hemo groups contain the iron molecule, enabling us to exchange oxygen with the air. Once the oxygen is inside the body, it’s transported individually to each and every cell, where it’s used to release the energy stored in the food we eat, through another multistep reaction. The citric acid cycle, often called the Krebs cycle, more technically, called the Szent–Györgyi–Krebs cycle, or TCA cycle (tricarboxylic acid cycle), is carried out in specialized organelles, the mitochondria which have their own DNA that comes directly from our mothers unlike the rest which is half from both parents, requires eight enzymes to oxidize a two carbon molecule, acetate. The process begins when the acetate is fused with a four-carbon molecule to create a six carbon citrate. The citrate continues through the process, releasing carbon dioxide and through oxidation, releasing elections that are used to form NADH, FAD, and FADH2 molecules, and ultimately ATP which stores usable energy. For every molecule of NADH and FADH2, 2.5 and 1.5 molecules of ATP are generated. This process occurs in the around 30 trillion cells that make up the human body, all day, every day. Most of us wouldn’t say we were thankful for each and every breath. It’s one of those things we take for granted until something goes wrong, but considering the millions of things happening that enable us simply to breathe, all of it without our knowledge and none of it under our control, perhaps we should be. Moreover, unless you believe God created life in one grand event, we should be thankful for the 3.5 billion years of evolution (or more) that produced this marvel in the first place.
Gratitude is a synonym for thankfulness. The word is derived from the Latin, gratus, which simply means “pleasing,” suggesting a more selfish perspective, as in we should be thankful when someone pleases us. It also suggests an even broader one, that we should be thankful for whatever pleases us. Given the size and scope of this great world, all its wonders and treasures, both natural and manmade, from the awesome and awe-inspiring to an everyday garden, it’s pleasures and delights, from once in a lifetime experiences to that first sip of coffee in the morning, it’s surprises and excitements, from what we have within ourselves to our bond with others, there should be no shortage of things that do so, even its trials and tribulations, for most make us stronger, better, more ready for the next. This Thanksgiving, these are a few of the things you should be thankful for.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 