Gratitude

About a week ago, I was going to post a tale of woe. I had it all written down, all you never wanted to know about how difficult my life is and how I am not who I want to be. And then I remembered a thought I had several weeks ago: I don’t do anything that I don’t actually want or choose to do. Most of the things I do in life are things I love. So it might be an idea to actively start loving them, instead of complaining about them.

My woe can be expressed by slightly adapting the words of Sarah Ban Breathnach in her lovely book Simple Abundance: “One ordinary morning I realized I was emotionally and physically exhausted from concentrating on things I wanted to [be] and couldn’t […]. I felt trapped in a vicious circle. The more I focused on lack and on what I couldn’t [be], the more [anxious] I became. The more [anxious] I became, the more I focused on lack.” (For her version, replace ‘be’ with ‘buy’ or ‘have’ and ‘anxious’ with ‘depressed’.) I am always striving to be better, to grow spiritually, to feel and experience more deeply. And it is actually stressing me out. And surely, that’s not right.

Inside, I am always complaining because I am not where I want to be. Even though I love my work, I resist going there, because there were so many other things I wanted to do. And even though I love my house and the wild, unkempt look of my garden, I feel stressed that I haven’t done anything in it this year. At every step, at every moment, I want to be in a different place from where I actually am. This is really pronounced when I’m on holiday. I can’t really just sit somewhere. I am always thinking about what is next: where we’re going to eat, or sleep. What we’re going to do next. Always restless. No wonder I’m stressed!

An then somewhere in the last week, the answer came to me. Gratitude. It’s a really simple thing. If I decide to be grateful for what I have and who I am, I don’t have to strive to be somewhere else or somebody else. I can just feel the joy of it and appreciate the here and now.

I read Sarah’s book years ago. She recommends starting a gratitude journal, where you write down five things to be grateful for every day. I tried that for quite a long time, and it didn’t make any difference to me. Because writing it down is not the same as feeling it. What I need to do is to catch myself in the moment where I feel anxious about something and change my mind about it here and now. The key to the key, and the key to all spiritual work, is the here and now. This is where it all happens. Here and now is where you change your future. Here and now is where you can do magic: to change consciousness according to your will.

And that is what I am trying to do here: to change my consciousness, the way I see and experience my life, according to my will. I want it to be easier, and I want it to be more beautiful. I have had enough struggle and ugliness for no good reason. It is my will to find my joy. And here and now is the only place I am going to find it.

My hope is that, if I practice conscious gratitude and joy for long enough, it will seep down into my unconscious and eventually become automatic. I hope that it will become my natural way of being. I hope that it will heal some of the wounds my anxious striving has caused me. But you know what? It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t. Whenever I catch myself and change my mind to gratitude, I do feel easier, and life becomes more beautiful. So it is worth doing, just for its own sake.

So this is it: the start of yet another journey, or the next step in the journey of my life. I’ll let you know how it goes.