We may have to squint a little to see the good stuff but it's there. It's always there and it always has been.
I myself am prone to nearsightedness - easy to be grateful for what I can see and smell and hold right here, right now. Today these are plentiful.
Retrospective gratitude... well, that's another thing entirely, isn't it. Particularly when there are painful, ugly chapters in our story and really we're just relieved to have survived them.
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I was most certainly not grateful for a lot of it - and if I'm honest, I wasn't particularly grateful for much of anything until I was at least thirty. I could not feel thankful because I was in a constant state of victimhood - why should I be grateful when life was a constant shit show? Somebody owed me for putting me through all that chaos and I walked around with a chip on my shoulder bigger than any redwood tree.
Hell no I wasn't grateful - God and everybody (including me) had screwed me over.
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Life hurts sometimes. It just does, and nobody gets a pass...but we DO have the ability to choose how to live with it.
As nutty as it sounds, being grateful for our difficulty is also the analgesic for it. I feel better when I feel thankful. In this sense, gratitude not only acknowledges a gift but it is a gift in itself.
Perhaps you've heard the saying, "Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting on someone else to die". So goes it with a lack of gratitude - I am the person who suffers most because I am intentionally blinding myself to the goodness in my life.
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Taking it a step further, I have also negated the creative benefit of pain. I'm not talking about the influence of pain on artistic expression, although that's certainly one aspect.
No, what I'm saying is that pain creates us. We cannot become our better selves if we only know comfort and ease.
Painful experiences shape us; we either become bitter people or better people. The silver lining serves as a tether, a lifeline that grounds us and mitigates emotional tornado damage.
Without gratitude, bitterness is inevitable and it is a miserable existence. Bitter people are hard to be around and even harder to live with. In this respect, gratitude is also a preventive measure against the pain of loneliness.
Gratitude redeems pain - it acknowledges the value of our troubles. And we can't fully experience joy unless we've known sorrow.
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I'm not endorsing rose-colored glasses. I'm really not. I'm just suggesting that you check yourself for the crap-colored ones because when you wear them, that's all you will see, plus you'll probably get some on you. Gross.
This post was actually prompted by the flood of people giving thanks for this and that on Facebook over the past several days. My inner judgy sourpuss (let's call her Cleo) likes to think that everyone is up to no good and deemed it as insincere virtue signaling. Look here, everybody! See me being grateful? I'm super blessed, definitely more blessed than you.
What a jerk. As soon as I mentally gagged Cleo, I recognized that people were projecting warmth and appreciation through social media versus "woe is me" and "the sky is falling". They were celebrating undeserved goodness and giving thanks for gifts and opportunities. The sincerity of their thankfulness is irrelevant and actually none of my business - besides, some very smart people have taught me the inestimable value of fake it till you make it.
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Gratitude. It's good for what ails ya. And it will make all the difference when we look back on 2020.
