Lessons in Gratitude, Day Two

One of the things that often happens when you put something out there is that what you put out (a concept, an idea, etc.) immediately gets challenged. Take my decision to write daily about at least one thing that I’m grateful for. It wasn’t the words I wrote yesterday that got challenged, but the thing itself. Yesterday was a good day, alright at the beginning, strong in the middle and pretty good at the end. So in that spirit I came home and wrote my first lesson in gratitude. Today has in fact been a very different day.

Today was one of those days that, unlike yesterday, started off shaky, got harder in the middle and this evening I find that I am digging deep to close it out on a positive note. And so along with my list of ten things I am grateful for (like the incredible privilege of having a computer that allows me to communicate with so many people instantaneously) I want to focus this evening on how very grateful I am for the strength of will I have to get up in the morning and get myself through the day.

Over the past few months I’ve had what Lemony Snicket calls “a series of unfortunate events” happen in my life. They were the kinds of things that find their way onto those, “10 most stressful life events” lists. I remember as all these things were piling on feeling pretty terrible about my lot in life and expressing serious uncertainty as to how I was going to make it. In the midst of all of this, the tornadoes hit Tuscaloosa Alabama and as I watched people literally picking up the pieces of their lives off of the ground, I realized that while things in my life were hard, they could have been much, much harder.

Being grateful for something is not that hard. I couldn’t throw a rock in any direction from where I’m sitting right now and not hit something that I appreciate and am grateful for in my life. This is not to diminish the severity of the challenges I and so many others in the world right now are facing; they are quite real. But somewhere inside of each of us there is a wellspring of gratitude or faith or happiness or hope or something that is available to us to tap into if we can just figure out how. It really is a matter of perspective.

So in this moment I choose to find that space of gratitude this evening that eluded me earlier in the day. I am grateful that when I reached down to find it, there it was. And there it always is if I remember to grab for it. And if I forget, I am learning to reach out to others around me who will help me remember.

I have no idea how I will feel when I wake up tomorrow morning, but I do know this: I’ll be grateful that one way or another I’ll be able to greet whatever the day brings.