Every day around this time I sit down at my computer and contemplate the day and what in it has piqued my interested in the gratitude department. Tonight is a somewhat amorphous, intangible feeling that by its nature is going to be tricky to describe. Lately I’ve been feeling a sense of what I can only describe as “rightness” about the path I am walking at the moment. While the particulars of this feeling are not crystallized or clarified (clarity about my life purpose has not exactly been present on a consistent basis, particularly in recent years) I can nonetheless sense glimmers of it, like seeing something just barely outside the periphery of my eyesight. I can’t tell yet what it is or what it means, but I can feel it coming.
If you asked me to point to the evidence supporting this feeling, I can’t. I’m not even sure I can point in the general direction of it. It’s almost silly to write about it, except that sometimes for me in the writing I find clarity. And I also wonder if you feel it too. A sense of slowly, inexorably moving into place and a whole bunch of other things moving into place around you. Is this what it feels like when the planets align for some spectacular celestial event? I wonder. It’s a little scary, actually. Because a part of me always worries a little that somehow I’m going to screw up whatever it is, that this right feeling will pass and the more familiar discomfort will return. That feeling good, as I wrote about the other day, is a temporary thing and that I should enjoy it while I can.
This is not a particularly useful feeling under which to operate, so I am choosing to feel and speak with a continued sense of optimism that indeed I can roll with whatever happens, and that what’s happening is good. I’ve spent too much time mired in sadness and depression and am no longer willing to continue residence in that particular place. I am testing the hypothesis that happiness, contentment, wellbeing is in large part a choice, a matter of perspective. And after years of operating from a glass-half-empty perspective, I decided a while ago–right in the midst of intense “suffering” and life drama–that I was going to raise myself up to a different place. It hasn’t been easy, but I’ve definitely made progress. There are some who theorize that people who are genetically predisposed to suffer from depression might as well get used to it, that you’re just going to be sad. Well I’m not buying it, and am determined that genetics notwithstanding I’m going to continue on my upward spiral toward unprecedented gladness. If I don’t quite make it, it won’t be because I didn’t reach for it.
I’m not sure exactly where this sense of optimism and rightness is coming from, but I like it. I don’t think it’s simply a matter of a change in my fortunes, though that surely helps. (Or could it be that my change in fortunes came about as a result of my growing optimism? Hmmmm.) I am grateful to be in this space in this moment. I may not live here yet, but I am enjoying the visit.
