Thank youuuuu so much for that (no, but really)
Tip #10 : gratitude over everything
This post is part of a series I’m writing from mid-June to mid-November 2024, on things that helped me rebuild my confidence, sense of self, and increased my delight in my life after massive difficulty in multiple areas. For full details and post links to all 110 things, go to this post here.
Tip 10 – gratitude over everything
Gratitude is the thesis of my life.
Gratitude helps me remain level, helps me remain curious, helps me remember to love, to chill, to let things go, to remain present but not ambivalent, to want more for myself because of what is possible in the world and for which I am grateful to already know a little bit of.
Gratitude improves my relationships, it helps me want to try again on things that are difficult instead of abandoning them, it helps me realize my portion of time is small and to use it better and as best as I can.
Gratitude makes me appreciate small things and big ones.
Gratitude makes me appreciate my feelings, and acts as a team with acceptance to improve everything in my life.
Gratitude is acceptance with a golden outline.
Gratitude, to me, does not ignore what is bad. It holds hands with what is lacking, what is difficult, painful, unfair, wrong, impossibly heartbreaking, and shares spaces with those things.
It doesn’t ignore anything.
Gratitude says and yes this also is true.
And yes this also.
This too.
Both and all of the things are here, together, at the same time.
Gratitude is an honest acceptance of how things are and why. Gratitude is seeing all those details. Gratitude is a taking account of what is, not ignoring or delaying what is, or living in fanciful delusions in a live laugh love hellscape of beige pottery.
Ross Gay’s Book of Delights is an incredible resource for exploring how the good and the bad exist at once and I highly recommend it for just about everything, but especially for practicing gratitude and acceptance of the difficult being in the same places as the good.
Gratitude says to me that it is bad sometimes and it is also good sometimes and those times happen at the same time all the time.
Both things.
Both.
Back when I was a church going Mormon person, I was asked to speak on gratitude in the main chunk of the Sunday time - which meant I had at least 30 minutes to myself up there on the stand with the microphone.
I was starting to feel a sort of misalignment with church things specific to my experience (as it always is) at the time, and I wanted to try to express with my words that there were other sources of value in the world besides the prayed upon texts.
I wanted to see if I could use words of truth from other places, and in so doing pull some focus to how the congregation, and ideas of church as I perceived them at the time (very us/them chosen/not chosen group oriented and a little never the two shall mix), I wanted to poke at that and bring in things people would be able to relate to but might not have heard before. I wanted to use the tone of the message and find pieces of truth there also, in the non scriptural sources of value to me.
I didn’t use any quotes in that talk from church people, or from scriptures, which I’m not sure if anyone even knew besides me. Doesn’t really matter, but it felt like an act of small boldness for me to say there is value in the world from people who are not a part of this building and we can learn from and share with each other too. Religion, as I had been taught and experienced it, was very insular, for better and worse.
Anyway, I used a quote from a book I’d read – Rainn Wilson’s memoir The Bassoon King, highly recommend btw, in which he details his faith journey and says this about gratitude, or something close to it, I’m paraphrasing - “even if you only have a pebble and a chicken you can still be grateful for the health of your chicken and the luster of your pebble” and I love that.
Deep in the breath of us, our little souls and the air sparking the rest of our systems continual existing are our essences.
All the rest is just attachments.
Gratitude, to me, is the breath of it.
The luster of the pebble.
The health of the chicken.
Gratitude is everything. It is the stuff the core is made of. It is the value, the spark of want for knowledge, for better solutions, for love and good things, for correcting and improving actions, gratitude is all of it.
I looked through old journals a while ago – as one does – and found when I knew I would be needing to redo everything about my life I’d made plans for gratitude coaching (I don’t even know what that is but I wanted to do it).
Soon after that, or during the same time (what I’ll call for now the first big wave of my self growth process) I started a couple little gratitude groups among friends and family. Just group texts, and we did them every day for three months.
It was so wonderful.
Really became a highlight of my day to have the reason (peer-pressure lol) to reflect, and to share these moments with people I care about - it was kind of a bonding thing too.
My idea with those was to just see what happened and how it felt to do that (great and great). But I also wanted to turn them into little books.
Remember those places that you could link your IG and it would automatically print and send your grid in a little book every month or however long you set it to? I wanted to do that, but with gratitude journaling.
By participating in a text group chat your answers or daily gratefuls would be compiled and then sent all nice and printed to their door every few months. I figured people keep gratitude journals and forget to write in them all the time, with this group thing people do it more often, find connection that way, and the record of their grateful things that would be made for them.
I think that was early in 2019 – by the fall my marriage had ended (we had separated geographically and had gone through a couple more therapists on the way), I was still in grad school and then in charge of kids all the time too, started working at the library part time, and the next year was covid – so unfortunately nothing came of that, but it was a useful exercise and I’m glad I did it.
Anyway.
Gratitude over everything.
Gratitude is the most potent game changer I can think of.
Gratitude centers me, calms me, reorients me, helps me appreciate my being, my loves, my people, my opportunities, the help and resources and things I have ahead of me and is the most central game changer.
Thank you for being here - ttyl
xx-Marian