Awareness

I suppose that the last thing I can or should say about gratitude is that it’s easier than we often make it. I tried to keep a gratitude journal about 10 years ago. I would sit down before I went to sleep with a small journal and jot down things that had happened that day which elicited gratitude. I hated that practice. I hated how difficult I found it to name things in my day that I felt grateful for. I hated sitting in front of a blank page for long periods of time unable to come up with a single thing. I hated that I had picked up a practice that I thought would make me more grateful, but seemed like all it was doing was highlighting my ingratitude. So it was a practice that fell apart rather quickly. 

At one point I read this prayer, “God, help me to quiet my noisy, worrisome mind in my ordinary world. Help me to relax in the familiar and to be aware of and appreciate it." That helped me reframe what it meant to practice gratitude. Instead of stressing over my inability to quantify experiences of gratitude in a journal, perhaps what I needed was to reexamine how I experienced gratitude. I was looking so hard for big marquee moments where I would be overwhelmed with thankfulness that I was completely missing the thousands of opportunities to be grateful every day. 

I started this week with a quote from Diana Butler Bass, so it seems appropriate to end with one too:

“That is what a practice of gratitude comes to. All around us, every day, there are gifts. Whether we are facing a crisis or not, no matter our challenges or feelings, there are gifts, most of which go unnoticed, unappreciated, and often disregarded. Sometimes they take us by surprise-we experience the "aha" of being helped, or we suddenly see a beautiful sunset, and gratitude wells up in our being. Gifts seem to spring upon us like an epiphany, bursting our hearts with that wild admixture of humility and joy that we know as gratitude.

“But if we cultivate our awareness to see those gifts more often, with clearer and more consistent vision, something else happens. Thankfulness becomes more habitual, a regular part of how we respond to the world. Yes, gratitude still holds the power to surprise and to elicit a strong emotional response. However, as a habit, it also becomes a steadying companion, incorporated into the story of our lives. Gratitude is not just a knock-your-socks-off revelation of goodness and beauty; it emerges as a daily-even hourly-disposition of appreciation toward familiar gifts, including the tailwinds of blessing.”

Rev. Ryan Young