RADICAL GRAITUDE

It’s pretty easy to be grateful for the people we love, the stuff we have, the food we eat, and all that jazz, even if we forget and take our usual measure of good fortune for granted, it generally doesn’t take much to pause and enjoy the bounty of our lives. So, let’s look at how pushing “the gratitude envelope” can be a profound and revealing experience.

Can you be grateful for your pain? For that SOB that cut you off on the highway? Can you feel thankful for the boss that you swear refuses to notice your contributions?  Ask yourself this question with regard to these seemingly annoying experiences: What am I pretending I don’t know? Are you pretending that your pain isn’t a valuable messenger? Pretending that you are in the ‘right’ while thinking nasty thoughts to that guy on the highway? Are you pretending that you don’t know that you cower or hide around your boss, becoming ‘invisible’ with some intent?  What is it costing you to pretend not to know how your thoughts and actions contribute to your own suffering? What is it costing you in health? In relationships? In finances?  What if those irritating experiences are messengers from you to you…ones that, with a measure of honest reflection can reveal a course correction that may even be life altering?

 Authenticity is a choice. Gratitude is a choice. The more we are able to admit what we pretend not to know, the more able we become to appreciate and yes, even feel grateful for things in our lives that, without that honesty, would just become fuel for the way we upset ourselves and make ourselves feel like victims of circumstance. I’m not advocating that fake ‘attitude of gratitude’ crap- I’m suggesting you get out the shovel and dig down to the truth of things. Sure, be angry- and dig until you’re not.

Almost every experience, even the truly craptastic among them, contains a valuable tool that can be used to help us build our dreams.  It is most often NOT the pleasant daily abundance that provides us with the friction required to bust out of our comfortable delusions…but the irritants, those little grains of sand that wear away our decorum, our repression, and our pretenses.

This Thanksgiving, I suggest this radical idea- to offer thanks to all those who have annoyed the daylights out of you, and to look for and celebrate the circumstances that have made you squirm, forced you to be creative, or ask for help, or reset your priorities. Truly, these are all blessings in disguise.

 Even a grain of sand wrapped in gratitude becomes a luminous pearl.