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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 224 (Nov 30, 2025) — 2025 Gratitude Edition
The Sloww Sunday newsletter sends to 10,000+ readers slowing down to the wisdom within. If you enjoy this issue, please help grow Sloww by forwarding this newsletter to others.
New to Sloww? Here’s what it’s about in a nutshell (which mirrors the newsletter sections below):
🌅 Gratitude first thing in the morning
- “When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive; to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” — Unknown (commonly attributed to Marcus Aurelius)
- “I am excited to get up every morning, and I am grateful to go to sleep at night. And, I feel good about what I’ve thought about—what I’ve spent my time, and my neurons, and my heart on in the day. To me, that is a pretty important and central part of the definition of ‘success.'” — Maria Popova (The Marginalian, formerly Brain Pickings)
- “The first thing I do pretty much every morning is look out the window and just watch the trees move in the wind for a little bit. I don’t have to try to care about them or try to find them beautiful, they’re just fucking beautiful … There’s this gratitude: I was sleeping, this ‘Daniel consciousness’ wasn’t here, and then it boots again and now it’s here.” — Daniel Schmachtenberger
0️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Lifelong Learning & Deeper Development (Sloww Stage Support)
🧠 Featured Product: Synthesizer Course: The Flagship Course for Synthesizing Minds
🌎 Gratitude for the abundance of enough
From Robin Wall Kimmerer:
- “Gratitude is a really radical act in a consumer-driven society that’s always telling you, ‘Consume more, take more.’ What if, in deep gratitude, you said, ‘I have enough, thanks. I live in a really abundant world’ … Gratitude is our first responsibility because gratitude acknowledges the gifts of the world—things that we have not bought and paid for, things that we don’t necessarily deserve, but they are given to us.”
1️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Intentional Living (Sloww Stage 1)
😃 Featured Product: The Hierarchy of Happiness: 100+ Powerful Perspectives on How to be Happy (Free eBook)
💪 Gratitude as heroic virtue
Three tips from Brian Johnson of Heroic (formerly Optimize):
- Gratitude Science: Science says that there’s a universal top 5 set of virtues most robustly correlated to our eudaimonic flourishing: gratitude + hope + zest + curiosity + love (zest, hope, and gratitude are the top 3 most highly correlated with your flourishing).
- Gratitude Journal: You’re 25% happier simply by doing a gratitude journal capturing 5 things once a week for 10 weeks (oh by the way, you’ll sleep 30 minutes more a night, and you’ll exercise 33% more than people who aren’t happy).
- Gratitude Mantra: “I appreciate all the blessings and gifts in my life.” (or, “I appreciate what I have: God, thank you for blessing me with the gift of…everything.”)
Pair with:
- Activate Your Heroic Potential: “Areté” by Brian Johnson (Book Summary)
- Optimize with Brian Johnson: An Intro to his Life’s Work on Virtues, Habits, & the Fundamentals of Optimal Living
- 🔒 Brian Johnson Synthesis: How to Optimize & Activate Your Heroic Potential (+ Infographic)
2️⃣ Explore More: 50+ posts on Life Purpose (Sloww Stage 2)
🧭 Featured Product: Ikigai 2.0: A Step-by-Step Guidebook to Finding Life Purpose & Making Money Meaningfully (+ Bonus Workbook)
😢 Gratitude for pain and suffering
From Anthony de Mello:
- “Think of some of the painful events in your life. For how many of them are you grateful today, because thanks to them you changed and grew? Here is a simple truth of life that most people never discover. Happy events make life delightful but they do not lead to self-discovery and growth and freedom. That privilege is reserved to the things and persons and situations that cause us pain … Every painful event contains in itself a seed of growth and liberation. In the light of this truth return to your life now and take a look at one or another of the events that you are not grateful for, and see if you can discover the potential for growth that they contain which you were unaware of and therefore failed to benefit from. Now think of some recent event that caused you pain, that produced negative feelings in you. Whoever or whatever caused those feelings was your teacher, because they revealed so much to you about yourself that you probably did not know. And they offered you an invitation and a challenge to self-understanding, self-discovery, and therefore to growth and life and freedom.”
- “Think of some irritating person you know and say this painful but liberating sentence to yourself: ‘The cause of my irritation is not in this person but in me.’ Having said that, begin the task of finding out how you are causing the irritation. First look into the very real possibility that the reason why this person’s defects or so-called defects annoy you is that you have them yourself. But you have repressed them and so are projecting them unconsciously into the other. This is almost always true but hardly anyone recognizes it. So search for this person’s defects in your own heart and in your unconscious mind, and your annoyance will turn to gratitude that his or her behavior has led you to self-discovery.”
- “It is impossible to be grateful and unhappy.”
3️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Mental Mastery (Sloww Stage 3)
🧠 Featured Product: Mini Mind: 365 Days of Bite-Size Brain Food
🙏 Gratitude as ‘thank you’ for everything
From Meister Eckhart:
- “If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.”
Another version:
- “If a man had no more to do with God than to be thankful, that would suffice.”
4️⃣ Explore More: 100+ posts on Spiritual Seeing (Sloww Stage 4)
👣 Featured Product: Wise Walk: 365 Days of Enlightening Exercise
A few final words on gratitude:
- “Some people are always finding fault with Nature for putting thorns on roses; I always thank her for having put roses on thorns.” — Alphonse Karr
- “Try, wherever you are, to be conscious and to be grateful. See what needs to be done in the moment, and to do it in such a way that you’re moving in a direction of greater compassion, greater love, and greater understanding.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
- “To love God with one’s whole heart means to say a wholehearted Yes to life and all that life brings with it. To accept, without reservations, all that God has ordained for one’s life. To have the attitude that Jesus had when he said, ‘Not my will, but yours be done’. To love God with one’s whole heart is to make one’s own the words made famous by Dag Hammarskjöld: For all that has been, Thanks. To all that shall be, Yes.” — Anthony de Mello
Want more? Check out the first special gratitude edition newsletter here.
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All the best,
Kyle Kowalski
Founder, Sloww
