30 days of happiness: 3 things to be grateful for
I have to begin with
confession. Gratitude is hard for
me. It is not that I am not
grateful: I am incredibly blessed
with everything from a healthy body to great kids to cute shoes. The problem lies with the
depression. When I can list 427
things I have to be grateful for and I am still depressed, I don’t feel cheered
up; I feel defective. Clearly, a
person as blessed as I am should be filled with joy and constantly grateful for
all 427 things. Nope. The “thinking distortion,” as they say,
that I work against every day tells me I am worthless and hopeless and
stupid. My failure to be cheered
up by what I am grateful for tends to reinforce the distortion rather than
combat it.
However, I am willing to try
again. I have promised myself and
said publicly that I am doing this challenge, so I will faithfully make my
list.
Today I am grateful for:
Macaroni and cheese
Clean laundry
Naps
I went to the grocery store today
and had a really pleasant conversation with a woman who has worked there as
long as I’ve been shopping there.
She helped me find something in the continually rearranged merchandise,
which led into a discussion of stick blenders and white bean soup. I thanked her for her help.
Now that I have written down that
last part, I am seeing something.
It is easy for me to be grateful to someone, but hard for me to be plain
grateful. I appear to
conceptualize gratitude better as a relationship rather than a feeling. So what I need to do, when I practice
gratitude, is not just to make a list, but to thank people.
Thanks for this challenge,
Toku. I learned something.
posted by Janet Salsman at 2:01 PM
1 Comments:
I saw something else. There is in your original paragraph that because you have so much you shouldn't feel depressed. That somehow because you are blessed depression has no place in your life. But the thing is that each of us contains multitudes.
We are so amazing because we can hold deep sadness and deep gratitude in our big hearts all the time. So what if the next time you focused on gratitude and still felt sad you let both feelings just be as they are. You could feel the depression like a pit resting in your stomach while also feeling the warmth of gratitude in your heart.
The point of gratitude isn't to fill your life with it so that everything else is pushed out. The point is to add gratitude to your life so that even when you feel pulled down it's buoyancy offers you the support you need to keep your heart open.
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