I try to follow the admonitions to gratitude but I'm not very good at the practice. The concept twists and turns in my mind and doesn't seem to end up being what the admonishers were imagining.
It is a different matter if all you mean is to pause and take note of the enjoyable aspects of my life. In the summer I enjoyed the fluttering butterfly hovering above a colorful flower but I know that the flutter and the flower form a transactional relationship in which food is traded for carriage in the interests of reproduction. The plant might be grateful that flying insects are hungry enough to make this transaction except that gratitude is not an attribute of botanic existence and being thankful that someone else lives at the edge of starvation seems unworthy.
My enjoyment of the scene is orthogonal to the real purpose and function of the butterfly and the flower. I'm glad that I was able to enjoy watching that transaction. I wouldn't say that I am grateful that a couple of living beings transacted an exchange of mutual benefit without any reference to me or my existence.
I am reminded here of the activity of some juveniles of another insect species who spent their summer breaking down the dead body of a songbird. I find that scene disgusting to visualize without even being present. The maggots' purpose is to mine nutrition for themselves out of the cadaver. They are not intending to make any gift to me. However, I do benefit (albeit rather indirectly) and so I ought perhaps to be grateful for their effort.
I am glad that it is the role of maggots to eat dead songbirds and that it is not my task. But if eating decaying avian flesh were what my mind and body were built to accomplish I would no doubt be glad for every stricken robin and finch. Gratitude for not being born a Dipteran is specieism. Or generic chauvinism.
They say, they who admonish me to gratitude, I do not need to be differentially grateful for my life as if being a human male by the Fox River is intrinsically superior to being a whitetail doe residing near the St. Croix River. I should, they say, simply be grateful to be alive.
The alternatives include being dead, which I will be by and by, or being a rock outcropping, which is an honorable and useful existence, or being a thunderstorm, which is more transient and more glorious and almost as dangerous to others as being a human. My imagination is not capacious enough to range much beyond the planetary surface but I don't feel especially grateful for that lack of capacity.
Generally speaking and most of the time I am satisfied with the actual reality within which I find myself. Much of it I can enjoy and some of it I try to change, usually without much success.