On Practicing Gratitude...

gratitude journals should always be polka dotted...

It’s Holy Week.  In a few days people will return to Facebook and social media after their 40 day fast during Lent.  Others will consume sweets again or other forbidden foods.  Catholics will no longer frequent Fish Frys on Friday nights, finally able to eat meat any day of the week they please.  If my dad were alive he’d be counting down the days until he could enjoy scotch again, his yearly Lenten “fast.”

In the past I’ve fasted from television and online/impersonal shopping during the season of Lent.  I hadn’t planned on doing anything this year, but a few days before Ash Wednesday I saw Momastery’s

challenge on Facebook to “fast from ingratitude” for Lent this year by noting three things you were grateful for each night.  To be honest I dismissed it pretty immediately.  I felt like I didn’t have much to be grateful for at the moment and in light of these past few months I didn’t think I should have to practice gratitude.  I felt like I deserved to be ungrateful.  I was angry with the turn my life has taken and the ways that everything feels heavy and hard.

In short, I was in the midst of the Infinite Sadness and practicing gratitude felt like more work than I wanted to do.  It required me to claw and scratch, to work at something that I just wanted to come naturally.  And in this season gratitude has not come naturally.

But as Ash Wednesday approached I found myself rethinking this stance.  It’s a poor way to live, really.  I had felt like Eeyore for weeks and if I wasn’t careful I knew I would find myself so deep in that mindset that it would require much more than I had to get out.   Still, I waffled, not sure of what I wanted to do.

Then something happened on that Wednesday that made me so deeply and profoundly grateful.  I broke down in the shower at the gym that morning, desperately needing some sign that hope and light still existed in my life and I begged God for just that, hope and light.  And then, later that day, two incredible friends gave me an early birthday gift that was so thoughtful, so loving, and so generous that it took my breath away.  It was a gift that made me feel loved and cared for, that supported my marriage that has borne the weight of so much stress these past few months and that gave me something to hope for and look forward to after many months of feeling hopeless and dark.  It was light and hope all in one.

And so I knew I needed to keep looking for things to be thankful for.  If God had given me such a big gift of hope and light maybe there was more I was missing while I held onto my “right” to be ungrateful.  And maybe this would be what I needed to pull myself out of the Infinite Sadness.

things I'm grateful for

I’ve been writing down three things every night and it’s been a good practice.  There is so much to be thankful for.  Even in the midst of the hardest season of my life so far, there is still hope and light.  Noting things each night helped me to feel profoundly grateful in the moment each day.  Most things were as small as gratitude for the way Toots shines when she laughs or Monster’s sweet little voice when he tells me “I like you Mommy.”  But to acknowledge them, to see them as the gifts that they are is a choice, an act of work at times.  It’s good work, though.  And I think I’d rather scratch and claw my way to a life of gratitude than wallow in Eeyore land.