Gratitude

Fuck. It’s been over a decade since I’ve had anything to say. The times are different, and so much has changed. I don’t know how many read blogs anymore, no less mine, and that is fine. I read some of my posts from 2013 and cringed a little. I ended up deleting them all and decided to start again afresh. I just need a tiny corner of the internet where I can express my imperfect thoughts, in imperfect English from time to time, outside the noise of modern social media – something I’m trying to peel away from… but that’s a different thought for another time.

In my attempt to peel away from the noise of online social media, I recently decided to read more and spend more time with creative things and thoughts. In an attempt to read, I started browsing the shelf. Yes, the dusty shelf with a modest collection of dustier books that past me swears he’ll get to…spoiler alert, he does not. But on the dusty shelf, one of the even dustier books caught my eye. It had a folded-up scrap piece of paper as a bookmark. I pulled it out, went to the bookmark, and was impressed to see I was over halfway through. I unfolded the piece of paper, which just so happened to be dated. November 2018.
Fuck. Eight years ago, but my brain registers it as two.
That was before A.I. was a thing. Before I heard what Bitcoin was. I mean, fuck, it was before my cat passed away. Before my dad passed away… Even before COVID.
I started reading from where I left off and was surprised by how much I retained. It has caused me to think about the last decade and a half, about how life has unfolded since the last time I read these pages, and all the synchronicities that have guided me to where I am. Everything feels like pure luck. A privileged life. The chances of me being where I am in life feel astronomically low (but certainly higher than much of the world’s population), like I was more likely to win the lottery (which I ironically haven’t). Thinking about my hardships over the decade and a half, things couldn’t have panned out any better or any other way, even if I couldn’t see it or understand it at the time. Things got bleak, and although I may have problems, as does everyone, I am glad the problems I do have are mine. This started to make me think about gratitude.

Maybe gratitude isn’t as easy as we assume. Maybe it isn’t something you verbalise every now and then, or feel in a fleeting moment. It’s more than, and more subtle than that.
Maybe gratitude also feels a little bit like guilt. Maybe it should feel like a tiny splinter under the skin – a reminder so it doesn’t become the assured ground you walk over daily without notice. Maybe when that happens, when the thing you were once grateful for becomes so common you rarely acknowledge it, perhaps that is the moment when you have taken it for granted, and have lost it.
Gratitude is an ongoing process that develops a certain character that you slowly assimilate into your being over time, and you become it. You become grateful. I don’t think gratitude is something that you ‘are’ or you ‘are not’ – I think it is something you work for, and in the process, something you become so that you may never lose it. I think you have to dig, find and excavate. You’ll get dirty and have to be honest with yourself, without any presence of witnesses. I think that is gratitude – the quality you feel when no one else can observe it.

I’m trying a little harder to truly be grateful. I just need to be reminded from time to time, as I suspect we all do. This is your reminder.