gratitude

They say to write what you know.

I know:

Life is a gift. It is a beautiful, maddening, amazing, and sometimes exquisitely painful gift. 

I have sometimes wanted to stand in the return line at Macy's with a gift receipt and exchange it for something shinier, but I know better. I am grateful. 

I was always taught to write thank-you notes for gifts, and I still spend the last week of December writing thank-you notes to relatives. Over the years, my gratitude has changed. 

It started as pictures scrawled in crayon, which my uncle called "refrigerator art." For years it was a formulaic "Dear ____, Thank you for the _____. It is so pretty. Love, Katie." These days, it's a more heartfelt note, with an update on the family and some well wishes thrown in. Either way, I think if there's one lesson I've learned over and over by messing it up, it's that gratitude, more than kindness or love or tolerance or anything else, is what makes the world go 'round. They are important, for sure, but gratitude acknowledges that we are constantly and abundantly blessed.

Gratitude to God says, "I am small. I am undeserving of Your great love and mercy and grace, and I know that were I to spend the rest of my life trying to prove my worth, I could not. And yet I will accept this great gift and treasure it and build the fiber of my heart around it, so that it is such a part of me that it cannot be torn out. I cannot repay the gift in kind, so I will sow it with deep roots and try to build a life around it."

Gratitude to another person says, "You have offered me something valuable, not just in what is tangible but in the intention behind it. I value you, and I value our relationship. It is give-and-take, not based on strict and calculating equality but based on balance. We put in what we can sacrifice and take what we need."

And so I am thankful for my family and my friends and God and my life. I am thankful for forgiveness and love and acceptance. I am thankful for little pleasures, bad crime dramas on television and long, lazy nights with a friend. I am thankful for things that hurt because there is a blessing in everything. What appears to be meaningless suffering is simply suffering that we cannot yet understand. 

I once had to keep a gratitude journal and then reflect on the experience for a seminar I took on emotion my junior year of college. It spanned a week, and it was a hard week. I spent several days of it in the hospital, and yet I chronicled the little things, a phone call from home and juicy strawberries from the cafeteria. It wasn't a life-changing experience, and it didn't catapult me into a new reality. Change doesn't often happen like that. But it did force me to notice my blessings, to open my eyes instead of clenching them shut and wringing my hands in distress.

I used to believe that optimism was just self-delusion, that people who looked on the bright side weren't "in-the-know." That if they just really knew what it felt like to suffer, then they would be pessimists, too. And counting my blessings is still an act of self-will. I have to listen to the Negative Nancy that lives inside my brain and then forcefully turn away, refuse to engage in such wallowing, direct my energy towards what is worth my time.

So I am grateful.