Although I'm very conscious of how lucky I am and I voice that often, both out loud to friends & acquaintances (& sometimes strangers) and to myself in my daily journalling, my formal gratitude practice has fallen away of late. I had started to notice its absence, but failed to pick it up again. So with Sunday being something of a catch-up day for me, it seemed like this was a good thing to be catching up on.
For those who don't know me, my gratitude practice is a very simple thing. I take a few scraps of paper and write down things I am grateful for. That's the core of it. There are no rules, really. It is simply the taking of time to notice the abundance in my life. In an ideal world, I would do it every evening: just three things from the day just ending that I am grateful for. Things. Experiences. People. Whatever. Big things, little things, real things, esoteric or imagined things. Things that made me smile, or taught me something, or reminded me that feeling pain also has a purpose.
Trust me: we can all find three things in a day to be grateful for. Being alive. Being our own wonderful unique self. Getting through another day. And that is on the toughest of days.
And if you don't feel grateful for being who you are, I ask you to consider who you would rather be.
Not on a whim, not on the surface level of their fame or success or talent or life-style or looks or wealth, but at the deeper level of who they are and what they have to live with – all the pain and hurt and doubt and sheer hard graft that is involved in their life, all the abuse they suffer for how they look, or how they think, or what they do. Consider even if you would want to think the way they think. Go deeper, and ask who you would rather be.
One of things I am grateful for is simply being me.
In an ideal world, I would make time to notice at least three things every day. I would write them down on slips of paper. I would fold the slips of paper and place them in my gratitude box.
My world is not ideal. To be fair it is wonderful, amazing, and full of beauty and joy (and occasional inconveniences and aggravations) and I am also human. Stuff gets in the way. Day-to-day stuff gets in the way of important stuff. I prioritise the wrong things in the moment just as much as the next person. And so I forget.
Until I remember.
Today I did more than remember. Today I decided to act. I wondered if I could conjure up 100 things that I am grateful for. Immediately I recognised that of course I could…the real question was 'how long would it take?'
The answer turned out to be about 45 minutes. I took 10 sheets of pretty coloured paper and decided to write 10 things (people, experiences, whatever) on each of them.
And that's what I did.
There were surprisingly few pauses and all of them short.
Then I took a pair of scissors and cut the pages into strips (one gratitude per strip) and folded them and dropped them into the box.
That's a me thing, and not remotely necessary for the exercise. I have a gratitude box that I drop stuff into during the year. I open it up on my birthday as a present to myself, a reminder of all the forgotten smiles from the year just gone.
Today, I started with the easy one: people.
Who are the people I am grateful for having in my life?
Initially I stopped at 10, to move on to other aspects, but as I worked through, other people insisted on their place in my hall of fame.
I started by simply listing their names, because I am grateful for them: as simple as that. I am grateful that they exist, that they are who they are and that they are in my life. Some names came up again as I acknowledged certain things that they are or they do or have done in the past that I am grateful for.
Some of the people I mentioned are no longer alive, but I am still grateful for the impact they have had on my life. We don't stop loving people just because they leave us.
As always, I included big things like the sun and planet earth, and I also included little things like butterflies and candle-light.
I was intrigued that the things usually first on my gratitude list didn't show up until quite late this time. I don't live in a war zone. Perhaps the fact that I needed to add the word "yet" explains why it didn't make it in sooner.
As soon as I had reached my hundred, and started to cut up the strips, a whole raft of other things started popping into my head. Things I hadn't included: again big things, and little things.
I didn't mention refuse collection, or the fact that I can steal best part of an hour to do this. I didn't realise how much I love the sound of scissors cutting through paper…or indeed my delight in pastelcoloured paper.
I started to remember other people and the things they do or have done for me. As I sit here now, I look around the walls of my back room and realise that I am grateful for the beautiful lady who painted the walls, and that she knew when to stop asking me if I was sure about the colour – I wasn't, and I still can't believe I did it, and I love it.
So here's the thing: taking time to be grateful really matters, because it makes us look at just how abundant our life is. It asks us to look into our selves and beyond ourselves.
We can be grateful for being who we are, for our health (however imperfect that might be), for the resilience that has got us this far, for our creativity (however we express that, be it in poetry or home-making, raising a child or a building), for all our quirks and whatever we learn from our failings.
We can be grateful for the enormity of the universe and the smallness of our place in it.
I can be grateful for 'the pretty blue flowers' that he didn't know are forget-me-nots and that now run riot over what used to be his garden. For a beach hut and the beach. For walking barefoot on the grass. For the people willing to teach me – and for my hunger to learn.
I can be grateful for the anger in others that I don't understand but that challenges me to think, and maybe think differently.
I can be grateful for someone's presence in my life and still be grateful for their absence on any given day when I need my down-time.
Most of all though, I think I am grateful for this: whenever I take time to look inside and around me, I find so much to be grateful for. So much beauty, support, wisdom, encouragement, challenge, interest, humour. So many people, family, friends, acquaintances, former colleagues, neighbours, strangers, teachers. So many things: all that I own or have let go or might or might not pass through my hands. Old things and new ones. So much wildness: from the stars in the sky to the weeds in my garden. So many experiences that have gone into becoming who I am at this point –and the infinite potential in those not yet tasted.
Most of all though, I am grateful that when I start to focus on the abundance on my life, not only do I feel enriched for having done so, but also the gratitude synapse in the brain gets triggered and I spend the rest of the day (or days) thinking oh yes, and this, and this, and this….
On a poetry walk last week, someone suggested that we find what we are looking for. I think there is truth in that. When we start noticing the abundance in our lives, start honouring it, we start looking for things to be grateful for and we find them. Again: big things and little things. I am grateful that I am loved. I am grateful for the smiley faced stone on my desk.
I am absurdly grateful that someone just re-tweeted something I wrote a year ago.
The simple fact is that when we focus on the good stuff, we start to feel lucky, which is a happy feeling. Happy attracts happy.
Go on: try it.
Carve out a lunch break this week. Go buy yourself an indulgent coffee and cake (or make them yourself if you're working from home) and start with the coffee, the cake and the lunch-break. And spiral out from there. Don't set an arbitrary number to achieve. It's not about numbers. You might not get past coffee-cake-break but just taking the time to be grateful for those three things, to REALLY ENJOY them, is a step on the path.
Or challenge yourself to sit down every day this week (Mon-Fri) and write down 3 things each day. Just three. Oh, and yes, things that didn't happen can be just as joyful as things that did. In fact possibly more so: how often do you celebrate that your car worked perfectly today, or that no-one in your family got hurt?
I remember being overwhelmed one Christmas day when Clive and I sat and realised that we didn't lose anyone this year, nobody died. Nobody of ours, that is. We mourn people when they're gone, how much better to celebrate them before then. If you are grateful to have someone in your life, why not tell them that. I am grateful for you – that you have read this far.
Be happy. Be grateful for whatever it is that makes you so.
