If I had the chance to go back and tell my younger self what I know now, one thing I’d share with her, is that her relationship with her parents isn’t static. At some point, she’ll see them as humans rather than parents, with weaknesses and blind spots and opinions she will disagree with.
I want to understand why my brain is wired in such a way that feeling appreciation, gratitude, pride, celebration is so fleeting. But, I don’t want to turn that understanding into another way I can criticize myself.
What I would like to bottle up to save for later.
The way I like to think about it, isn’t about my suffering or lack thereof. It’s that collectively, there is a sharing of the suffering that allows humanity to survive.
Despite everything, it’s still possible to feel bored simply because what we’re waiting for hasn’t happened yet.
Gratitude is not something to be earned by solving a problem. It is something we all deserve and something we can give to ourselves even when everything seems terrible. It’s not a denial to our own problems or the world’s problems, but the key to being able to solve them.
The reason gratitude is hard sometimes is the same reason that it works at all: it pulls us out of our own monkey brain, chattering away nonsensically, and plants us back in the moment. Back into the world around us.
For me, there are two important elements related to these daily gratitudes that help me with the way my brain seems to be wired, and to help me feel less like I’m passively drifting through my life rather than being IN my life fully.
Gratitude and appreciation sometimes feel like one of those boxes—and it can be even more depressing to think that having gratitude and appreciation is a motion to go through. Is it really gratitude if I don’t _feel_ it in my bones? I think the answer has to be yes. Just like a run still counts if it isn’t the run
