Today has been a good, long day and as is often the case with good, long days, I am tired. My weekend was somewhat shortened by being at a work event this afternoon, but it was a good one. I got to see my colleagues and coworkers in action and was impressed all over again and grateful to be working with such a good group of people. I don’t think they realize as individuals or as a collective just how valuable they are and the gifts they bring to our work and to the community at large. I am grateful for what I am learning and who I am becoming as I work with them. And for that I’m grateful.
In my relative exhaustion I have decided to offer some thoughts previously shared in March 2012, which interestingly also began with the words, “Today has been a good, long day.” As I re-read this particular post (Day 237) I was struck by how much of it still resonates with me a year later.
The other day I was watching Wayne Dyer doing a special on PBS. Wayne Dyer is a fairly well known spiritual teacher and writer. He was talking about the power in the words, “I Am,” and how important our language is in the way we refer to ourselves (like, “I am sad,” “I am angry” “I am fat,” etc.) I think about some of the messages I’ve sent myself recently from the realm of “I am”and some of them are not very good. So I decided this morning that I was going to write down some positive “I Ams” on a yellow sticky and put it up where I can see it. Because the truth is, I AM a lot of good things. So are you.
The trouble is that we take so little time acknowledging all the wonderful things we are and either ignore them or, worse yet, we dwell on all the icky I Ams. In a matter of one minute or less, I had written a list of about 12 things. And that was without really trying. When I look at the phrases they are not things that are difficult to believe or a stretch to imagine (like I didn’t say, “I am glamorous” for example.) But for the most part, they are things that are true and that I can actually believe about myself (things like “I am strong,” “I am resilient,” “I am wise.”) And just to stretch myself out there a little bit I did include, “I am beautiful,” which hasn’t always been the easiest thing for me to believe about myself,particularly depending on how one defines beauty. And I didn’t just stick with adjectives, I also wrote I AM statements in noun form, claiming some of what I see myself being. “I am a writer,” “I am a teacher,” “I am a mother,” etc. I plan to look at my I Am list and to add to it regularly and I invite you to do the same. God knows we know how to tell ourselves the bad stuff; and even if we have a pretty health dose of self esteem,the world around us, society-at-large sometimes seems wired to tell us that’s wrong with us and how we don’t measure up to some standard.
Now I’m not encouraging self-centered,narcissistic, navel gazing. In fact, as I am learning in my studying some Buddhist teaching, you can also extend this I Am practice to people around you. Tell a coworker, “You are wise” or a good friend “You are kind” or your child “you are beautiful” or whatever. You get the point. I will add “I am grateful”to the list.
It is helpful to think about the “I am” in the midst of thinking about gratitude. So much of what we believe about ourselves is about what we do, not who we fundamentally are at our core. We sometimes derive our sense of self and our self esteem from what we do for a living and how well we’re seen as doing it. What we do is not who we are; though they might be related they are nonetheless distinct. And so I am grateful for who I am and find that at times I really like who I am and who I am becoming as I continue to grow in wisdom and experience.
Today has been a good day, and for that alone I am grateful. And as Scarlett Ohara says, “Tomorrow is another day.” And so it is. Full of possibility and promise and I am grateful.
