At one time I was much happier as I clung to gratitude to make me so. It came naturally and easily to me. Lately, I seem to have lost that ability. Although, I find that it is the simple events and things in mostly Nature that cause me the most pleasure and satisfaction and revive my curiosity. Happiness, is a word I once knew and perhaps shall be for me no more. In this frame of mind, I finished reading this novel of Mr. Hardy's ... this passage below spoke right to me about finding strength and equanimity and perhaps a measure of peace and grace if not gratitude.

"As the lively and sparkling emotions of her early married life cohered into an equable serenity, the finer movements of her nature found scope in discovering" (teaching) "to the narrow-lived ones around her the secret (as she had once learnt it) of making limited opportunities endurable; which she deemed to consist in the cunning enlargement, by a species of microscopic treatment, of those minute forms of satisfaction that offer themselves to everybody not in positive pain; which, thus handled, have much of the same inspiriting effect upon life as wider interests cursorily embraced.

Her teaching had a reflex action upon herself, insomuch that she thought she could perceive no great personal difference between being respected in the nether parts of Casterbridge and glorified at the uppermost end of the social world. Her position was, indeed, to a marked degree one that, in the common phrase, afforded much to be thankful for. That she was not demonstratively thankful was no fault of hers. Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honour of a brief transit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness.."

~Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge