Gratitude
Just the other day Stephany, our Executive Director at Green Shoe, and I completed taping our 21st Podcast. The topic for the podcast was focused on my role at the Green Shoe Foundation. This opportunity allowed me to tell part of my professional story. One is never sure exactly where the destination of our Green Shoe podcasts will end up because while they have a planned “Theme”, they always contain open-ended questions. These questions are multi-faceted which could be exploring current connections to the model we utilize at Green Shoe, any related mental health issue, or sometimes even questions about discovering who we are and why we work at Green Shoe. I was surprised to find myself ending the podcast conversation by expressing my feelings of gratefulness for where I am in my life and how I got here. I have had the opportunity for personal growth by experiencing some difficult years which led me to the awesome opportunity to work at Green Shoe and lead our clinical staff. To be grateful for the hard times is usually more difficult than being grateful for the easy times, and I will tell you after 66 years, it takes practice, and lots of practice to continue to live feeling grateful through it all.
Gratefulness is a gift that only YOU can give yourself. No one else can make you feel grateful, it has to come from within. I would even say it is an individual choice, a thoughtful decision (the thinking and rational part of our brain) to be thankful for one hundred and one, or even one thousand and one things in our lives. I can choose to accept and enjoy the “good” things I receive today and tomorrow and be grateful. And the harder choice I need to make is learning how to choose to accept and fully embrace the difficult things, such as ice storms that destroy beautiful large healthy trees in our front and back yards, the loss of electricity, and the ability to keep our houses warm and comfortable, or more tragically, the death of a loved one taken too early by COVID -19. I would pose that learning to recognize the reality of the painful and difficult circumstances with acceptance is a healthy key to unlocking the feeling of gratefulness in your life. This gift of gratefulness you give to yourself can and will influence and change you and your relationships. That acceptance of the difficult circumstances takes a mature and thoughtful individual focusing on how one can remain present and aware of what one is feeling and how one can live authentically and love ourselves and others through heartache.
When you were told as a child to be grateful you have food to eat because there are starving children in the world who don’t have anything to eat as you stared at the canned spinach on your plate. The message of you need to be grateful didn’t cultivate feelings of gratitude, did it? Grateful for that green slimy food that made you gag as you tried to swallow it without tasting it going down, I don’t think so. Gratefulness got a bad rap in that situation, didn’t it? There is no way one could convince a child to be grateful for their spinach no matter what one said to them. And according to our model that is teaching a child to deny their reality; I don’t like the taste or the texture of this food, please give me something else nutritious to eat. Teaching a child to be grateful for difficulties is one of the hardest jobs a parent has to accomplish because they have the intellect and maturity of a child, not the understanding of a mature adult who knows by experience that life can bring difficulty and pleasurable things, usually in the same day. If we didn’t learn gratefulness by example from our caregivers it can be difficult as an adult to choose to feel grateful for the difficulties we do experience in adulthood.
As adults, we can have the very same thoughts and feelings as a child when things happen in our lives that are hard to accept and swallow, just like spinach. The loss of a job, COVID restrictions, racial injustice, political animosity, marital stress, children acting out, the list is endless. How can we maintain a sense of gratefulness in the midst? I suggest we choose to focus on the good things we do have, accept the difficult times, seek solace from your higher power, and talk about it with someone who will listen and be supportive. Learn to express your pain and distress in healthy ways and then choose to verbalize and express your gratefulness all in the same breath. Choosing to focus on the good things while not denying the reality of the difficult things today. Each day it’s a choice one can make: I choose courage over apathy, patience over compulsivity, gratitude over defeat, what are you choosing?
