An Intriguing Gratitude Exercise

"When I pump gasoline into my tank, I can imagine that the gasoline that is actually entering my tank is flowing backwards from my gas tank back through the pump nozzle and into the tank in the ground. From there I imagine the gasoine coming out of the tank in the ground into the tanker truck from the refinery. I imagine a fictional driver "Bob" or whoever, and I thank "Bob" for driving the truck to deliver the gas so that I can use it to live my life. It doesn't matter that the image of "Bob" is an accurate image of some actual person. What matters is that emotionally I am contacting some human who served my life with a deed of sacrifice...

Once I feel that I have thanked "Bob" sufficiently. I continue my exercise at the gas pump by tracking "Bob's" tanker truck to the refinery where I meet "Shirley" the lady who makes out the invoice that is on "Bob's" clipboard. I thank "Shirley" for her work and I thank "Bob" for his work and then listen intently as my gesture of thanks towards them flows into silence...

In this way I can contact numerous unrecognized persons who are serving me by working in the fossil fuel industry. Through this exericse of gratitude I can personalize the issues around the use of fossil fuel and find the serving human being at the basis for most things encountered in the daily life. This goes a long way towards dealing with the nameless and pervasive guilt and anxiety that live in the souls of most people today surrounding the loss of personal power to impersonal organizations and exploitive economic systems."