A Spark by Innocent Mwatsikesimbe from Questions Asked, chapter 11

Gratitude comes easily once you’ve seen worse — comparison does the work for you. The catch is in how the seeing usually happens: worst tends to show up right after the best is gone. Loss is gratitude’s usual tuition, and it charges in exactly the thing you were failing to appreciate.

Innocent paid it once. Something of great importance went out of his life, and only the long stretch without it taught him what he’d had; when it finally returned, every ordinary day with it began to register as a gift.

Loss isn’t the only teacher, though. A pair of questions does the same work for free: “Is there worse? What would I do without this?” The answer is never null — “There will always be a worse scenario than the present” — and keeping that in view grows the gratitude without the losing. Sometimes it takes seeing worse to see best; imagining worse, honestly enough, counts as seeing.