Gratitude

I’m sitting here with a great sense of gratitude for everything.

I realize that it’s impossible for me to feel negative emotions and gratitude at the same time. My brain doesn’t work that way. I wonder if anyone’s brain does? I can’t sit waist-deep in the bullshit of my day and simultaneously point to the sky and exclaim “Oh my God! What a beautiful sunset!” I can’t complain about a day and then inhale and have a mindful bite of the most delicious fork full of sweet dessert.

For me it’s impossible.

Gratitude snuck up on me

Gratitude all started decades ago.

I did this daytime talk show-inspired exercise of writing down five things I’m grateful for in my journal. On those days when life was too much and I couldn’t write an entry, I could still muster five bullet points on the goodness of the last 24 hours. Sometimes it was a slog. I really had to think. Sometimes it was easy. Sometimes the list was solely composed of food I had eaten that day. But eventually, as promised by the guest on that show, I started looking for positive things so I’d have something to jot down at the end of my day.

Magically (or maybe not that magically) I started looking at things differently. Slowly life became more hopeful. Everything became a bit prettier—and well if everything wasn’t amazing—at the very least five things were terrific enough to write down and that was better than four things, or no things. And, now years later I live in a pretty consistent state of gratitude which is really good for my soul.

Lessons

There are two lessons here:

1. When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. Thank you, Max Planck. I hope he actually said that. Let me know if I’m wrong.
2. Dum Spero Spero—Latin phrase that means “while I breathe I hope” which I had never heard until my sweet aunt in Greece said it and translated it to Greek for me. It was the exact lesson I needed. Thank you Aunt Katerina.

Does any of this mean I don’t have garbage days? Nope. Some days suck. That’s life. And that’s okay. But not all days suck anymore. Life can be hard but I have learned that living with ingratitude is harder.

At this moment I’m grateful for Yannis Poulopoulos’s songs playing, my coffee, the three little watercolors I made, the blue blue sky outside, and a mid-day exhale. What’s on your list?

As always, thank you for reading lovelies.