Every day, I make a conscious effort to find gratitude. This is significant for me because I’ve only recently been able to do such a thing.
My childhood is a yucky blur that I’d prefer not to revisit. My younger adulthood (twenties) is also a stressful, unhappy blur, as were much of my thirties. I’m well into my forties now (45…how did that happen?) and these past two years have been some of the hardest of my life. But they’ve also allowed me, for the first time, to readily summon gratitude when I hadn’t been able to before.
When I talk about gratitude, for me it looks like appreciation of everything good in my life (despite all of the undeniably hard things) and a newfound feeling of abundance (despite the continuing areas of lack). There are still a lot of things I don’t have, and a lot of things I hope maybe I will have someday, but there are also copious good things to report about my life right now if I actually take inventory.
I was reading up recently on Christopher Reeve, because my father is in a similar situation and I was looking for some sort of insight or commiseration. I learned that after he went through his initial grief, he came to a crossroads with himself and decided that he could either succumb to the paralysis and depression, or he could choose to try to do something positive with his life. And he chose the latter.
I’m not saying what I’m doing is the same thing or at the same level. But in some ways we all deal with crossroads and dichotomies of circumstance, where some parts of your life are good and some are not so good, and sometimes you have to make a choice about how to feel about the whole of it.
I think one of the turning points for me was when I decided that life – for all of us – is meant to flow, and none of us can really control the overall direction or the speed. I now believe that my role is mostly to float along and see what unfolds, to make small turns and corrections where needed, of course, and also to go in and out of the turbulent areas, but to generally treat it as a ride that I’m on – not one that I initiated or am in control of, nor one that I get to decide when or how it ends.
The better way to approach the ride is to focus on all the amazing parts of it.
I also believe that you can control the view, in a way. You can either ride along under a thunderstorm, or you can bask under the sun and listen to the birds sing. And perhaps your thoughts also create little forks in the river, allowing you to find a slightly smoother (or harder) tributary to your final destination? I’m not sure. Who knows really?
But why make life even harder than it has to be?
The only part of this ride you can truly control, sometimes, is how you respond to it. I have my hard days/weeks, where I start sliding into a pit and can’t crawl out for a while, but overall I’ve chosen gratitude. My daily reality doesn’t matter as much to me, anymore, as how I decide to feel about it every day.