I made a weird goal this year...
It's relatively easy to be grateful and thankful (or at least performative say you are) one day a year. It's considerable harder to make gratitude a way of life.
Hello,
It's relatively easy to be grateful and thankful (or at least performative say you are) one day a year. It's considerable harder to make gratitude a way of life, especially when things aren't going your way.
I made a weird goal this year to become easy to please. Don't get me wrong. I've always been thankful for readers like you, but I'm from the Mid-Atlantic, which means I grew up perpetually displeased...and it was exhausting. Slowly, though, over the last several months, it became easier to find the joy in everything, and from joy came both thankfulness and gratefulness even when things didn't go my way.
I had to look for it, often very hard, and push past the many things that were worth complaining about, to find the blessings in the pain, but they were always there. Over time they became easier to see, until they shone like stars even in the darkness. A lot of this journey is documented in our podcast, The Six Figure Author Experiment.
I honestly had no idea if perpetually thankful was something you could train yourself to be, but I tried anyway, only to find it made me happier in the trying, and in the becoming. It didn't make my circumstances any better, but it made me better for it. It's very hard to find something these days that isn't gratifying in some way, even if it's just because it helped me kill time and have an experience. I love loving things, which I never thought I would say.
Granted, I am in a privileged position, and that skews my perception, but it was specifically because of that position that I started to question why I didn't like my life more. I thought money would stop the hits from coming, but the familiar pattern of fleeting, momentary successes speckling consistent drains on my resources only increased as I became more successful. The more plates I spun, the more likely it was than at least one aspect of my life was burning down at any one time.
It was easy to focus solely on the fire, even at the expense of everything else going well, but it was equally exhausting, and it made me miserable. Turns out that fire could equally be used to roast marshmallows as it could burn my life to cinder.
Yes, my life might be crumbling to ash, but at least there are smores, and that is something.
As my friend Amy told me recently, it turns out that if you make up your mind to enjoy something, you will. Financially, this has been the worst year of my professional career, not because I didn't make money at all, but because every decision I made seemed like a financially ruinous one, and it bled me dry.
In previous years, I could blame the universe on some level for conspiring against me, but this year I couldn't point the finger at anyone but myself for the mistakes I made, which is very hard to admit, even now. I have built my life to weather a lot of rough patches, but they seemed to come every direction this year, and all at once.
Still, I find I am truly grateful for the suffering. I'd like for it to end now please, but I found a lot of joy in the suffering in a strange, Buddhist way, like I finally understood the Four Noble Truths in a deeply powerful way. I certainly think it's helped me produce the best work of my career, and that my deep dives into dark places allowed me to connect dots that others wouldn't be stupid enough to try and see.
While I learned in previous years to tolerate suffering, and even drown it out, this is the first year that I took any joy in it. My wife told me earlier this year that wallowing in the suffering is like taking a second arrow. We can't prevent every bad experience from happening, but we can control how we respond to it. That is the first arrow. When we choose to dwell in the negative, it is like taking a second arrow, and one that we can control.
Since so much of life is suffering, finding some bit of joy in it makes me imminently happier in every aspect of my life.
I know I am thankful for the ability to be thankful even when things aren't going my way and even in the dark places of my soul. I hope you can be thankful today, and I hope even more you can bring that into the rest of your year, too.
So, what do you think?
Do you find it hard to see the good in the bad?
How do you think about gratitude?
Let us know in the comments.
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Well written, Russell, and very relatable. This year has been a continuous battle in several areas of life, but being able to find those flashes of light and joy during the day that are always there but not always easy to see—the little things in life—has been what has kept me going despite any adversities life has thrown at me.
Very well said. I’m glad you’re finding success with it!
This is a practice I try to do, and I have succeeded with some frequency over the years. When I first started, I was going through what at the time was the darkest years of my life. (Two darker periods came later, and I’m glad I figured things out somewhat before them.) And I’m getting pretty good at it now.
At bedtime every night, no matter what, my partner and I share our bests of the day—at least two selections. In three years, I think we’ve only missed the exchange once. We try to be as specific as possible, so that it doesn’t overlap with more general gratefulness exercises. Most days it’s pretty easy, but sometimes there are rough days where I have to really try to find two specific bests beyond the basics (food, clothing, shelter). But there is power in the effort, and the selection tends to ease the stress.
And yeah, when I had a rough bout of high-fever Covid, my bests were simple and basic yet comforting.