Back to the Basics: Gratitude

It's a chilly and gloomy Tuesday in southern Florida. I’m sitting at The Hub, a resource center for those in recovery. Cynthia is helping me to write my first CV, which is a much overdue task that I’d been avoiding. Elevator jazz plays in the background, and I’ve had enough coffee and caffeine to grow wings, only I’m exhausted. I’m working as a housekeeper, part-time, and it's barely going to keep the roof over my head for one more week. By all accounts, I’ve hit my own personal bottom. Yet, I’ve never felt more contentment and peace in my adult life. 

Gratitude has the strangest effect on the soul. It’s very hard to conscientiously engage with the act of thankfulness, and still go to a pity party. Yesterday, I did feel a bit sad for my struggles, the weight of my worries felt a bit heavy to bear. But today I woke up and decided that I was resilient and grateful, and so I am. It took some time for the mental acumen to build to the point where I could execute choosing joy, but practice makes progress and I’m getting better at it every day. The affect of gratitude is plain, but clear: I am calm, collected, and appear to be okay, not just to myself but to others. 

Why is gratitude so difficult to grasp on to at times, especially knowing that it holds such power to shift the veil draped over our perspective? I think it’s because we identify with our sorrows more than we are willing to admit. We hold them dearly because it is the one place we allow ourselves to feel, even if only on the inside. Perhaps, too, it’s easier to find co-conspirators in suffering. How often do we truly feel that others genuinely share in our joys, that there is not some small contempt towards our contentedness? In a dog eat dog world full of competition and grasping, it seems that to be happy with a little thing is to settle for less. When did settling for simple joys become amoral, a personal failing? I don’t know, but I sense that it is in some way, a belief that I must break myself away from to truly embrace the joy of the little things.

What challenges present themselves when we attempt to embrace gratitude, contentment, joy in the little things? Nothing so large that five things you're grateful for, put down on paper for you to see and bear witness to, can’t combat or eradicate altogether. Does it remove our humanity? Certainly not. We can do it on sad days and still feel sad, but it reminds us of the wealth we have in the midst of our poverty, the triumph amidst the tragedy, the reconciliation possible when we are pulled from the rubble of our lives. I myself have very little material, if anything, to claim as my own. But this small practice has shown me what I do have; sobriety, community, time, and a host of intangible wins that only I can see when I look in the mirror. Life with gratitude is not perfect, it is life. But it is a life lived more fully, a life more whole and grounded, than a life unbalanced with discontent and pain. Allow yourself to experience both, today, and see what comes of it.

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