Gratitude

I love to complain.  I really do.  I’m good at it.  It’s one of the few talents I have.  I can rant and rave, whine, mutter, grumble, and rage with the best of them.  I’ve been trained well by my movies, TV programs, and songs.   I watch the news, and it seems only the bad things ever get our attention.  I watch stand-up comedians, who teach us to laugh at their grumblings over life’s little inconsistencies and letdowns.  Commercials teach us to be discontent with our lives to the degree that we buy whatever solutions they peddle.  All around us, resentments abound.

So when you start talking about gratitude, it usually gets relegated to Thanksgiving.  I like Thanksgiving because it forces us to quit our incessant whining.  We have one day where it’s just not cool to complain.  But carrying that attitude past the point of turkey leftovers is a challenge.

Recently I was stuck in traffic.  In L.A. this is no rare thing.  Traffic was backed up for what seemed like miles.  And like most of us, I had somewhere to be.  So there I sat, pondering the injustice of it all, and basically thinking what everyone else was thinking: “why does this happen to me?”  Eventually, the traffic crawled along to the point where we could see what the problem was: a terrible traffic accident.  On the shoulder of the road, crews were doing their best to handle two crumpled cars.  No sign of crumpled bodies, but you just knew that whoever had been in those cars was having a worse day than me by now.  As I passed by in my non-crumpled car, enjoying the climate-controlled air and free to go about my business, I was humbled.  Here I had been whining this whole time about “why do bad things happen to me”.  I had myself convinced that I was the victim.  But would I trade my car for theirs?  Would I trade my physical condition for theirs?  Would I trade my eventual insurance rates for theirs?  Would I trade the rest of my day for the rest of theirs?  In a word, no.  Chastened, I sped along to my appointment and on with my life.

Based on this, I had an epiphany: anything you can complain about, you can find a reason to be grateful for, too.  It’s all a matter of perspective.  Now, this is a challenge, and it takes some practice.  Let me give you some examples:

• “I have to work today” or “I hate my job” becomes “I have a job, and others are not so lucky”.
• “I’m fat” becomes “I live in a country where food is abundant”.
• “My car sucks” becomes “I have a car”.
• “My parents/kids/spouse/in-laws/family are jerks” becomes “I have a family”.

And so on.  The common thread here is that it could be worse, and you need to see that. 

I learned something else that was nice: whenever you’re feeling cranky, irritable, or put upon buy life’s little injustices, a good exercise is to start making a list of things you have to be grateful for.  And I’m not talking about the big, platitude-sounding stuff, like “I live in a free country” or “God loves me”.  If you are willing to sift through the details, you can probably come up with a few things at any given moment.

Here’s mine:

• Today, I got to work on time, or close enough that no one complained.
• The weather today is gorgeous.  Here it is, mid-January, and I’m wearing a short sleeved short outside with no jacket.
• I just finished a week-long cleanse diet with almost no cheating, and I think I dropped a few pounds without suffering.
• During my diet, I developed a taste for tea without sugar.  This is a good thing.
• As this week-long diet is over, I can have a nice lunch.
• My work day is halfway through, and I have no plans after work.

Thinking about what doesn’t suck in my life helps me to take what does suck and see it in perspective.  It helps me see that when I choose to dwell on the constant stream of negativity in my life, I’ll never take the time to see what is good, what is working, and what could be worse.

I’m just saying, it could be worse.  My challenge is to see it, recognize it, and live as though I understood it.