The other day while I was looking for a movie to watch and
not finding it, I ended up watching a televised show. The person who ran the
show was supposed to provide spiritual guidance to a guest from the audience. On
that particular occasion the guest was a woman who had lost her job, had a
daughter who had been diagnosed with a severe mental illness, and her unemployment
benefits were about to expire. In a few words, should she not find a new job
soon she would lose her home and end up living with her daughter in her car. The
woman was visibly distraught, and after sharing her story with the audience I
wondered what the answer from the host would be. By looking at him I could tell
right away that he was totally lost and did not know what to say. Looking studiously
at his guest he came up with the following answer: “Let’s look at things from
another perspective. Do you think you could look at this situation from the
point of view of gratitude?” To say that I was flabbergasted at his reaction is
to put it mildly. I know that there is currently a trend about the philosophy
of gratitude that I consider very useful because it helps us appreciate what we
have that others, especially poorer countries, don’t. This does not mean
however that we can give the word gratitude a connotation that it does not have.
Gratitude from the Latin gratia means to be thankful, which in this
particular case 
was not humanly possible. When seeing her desperate gaze I
felt deep compassion for this woman who had come to share such a difficult life
burden with someone who did not have the skills to help her. Let’s remember that since we are not born with
skills, they need to be acquired through study and much reading. Unfortunately,
unlike many other professions, some people think that psychology is easy to
improvise. They probably don’t know what a deep knowledge of human nature they
need to have in order to help another human being out of misery. Making use of
beautiful-sounding spiritual sayings is definitely not enough. It is also not
enough to sit on an elegant chair in front of a TV camera and act as a guru. Had
the host being skilled in counseling, this would have been his immediate
answer: “What you have been doing until today to find a job has not worked; what
about if you try another approach until you find what is there waiting for
you.”
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