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When was the last time you were very, very grateful and also very angry? Or very grateful and feeling road rage? Or very grateful and jealous?
I bet the answer is that you can’t remember a time like that. I know I can’t. The truth is, I’ve never been that combination of anything plus gratitude.
It’s hard to explain why that is. But I just know that when I am grateful, it crowds everything else out of the room. Gratitude is greedy, in the best possible way, because it hogs up all the oxygen in the room and I can’t feel resentful or gossipy or anything else I am trying to avoid. Gratitude is a one-trick pony.
I should clarify that I am talking about a specific kind of gratitude. There’s passing gratitude, where you are grateful for 10 seconds that a parking spot opened up in the mall parking lot at Christmastime. And then there is overall gratitude, where you feel grateful for the life that you have been given. That’s the type of gratitude that crowds out everything else, because I can definitely get a good parking spot and then want to choke out somebody in the food court 11 minutes later.
So why is gratitude about life such a powerful antidote to those other unwanted emotions? I think it’s because that kind of grateful is so all-encompassing. It factors in all of the elements of life that I am happy about, and it helps me realize the truth, which is that most of our lives are pretty awesome. I had an epiphany a few years ago when someone encouraged me to make a list of all the things that were bothering me, and then all the things I was grateful for. I’d encourage you to try that some time, especially on a day when you’re in a bad mood. What happened to me was, I wrote down three or four nagging problems in my life—and they were legitimate issues—and then I started writing down the things I was grateful for. I got to 10, then 12, then 15 things on that gratitude list, and seeing them side by side was quite jarring because it highlighted how much more good than bad there was in my life.
How long did that feeling of gratitude last? Well, it wasn’t permanent, that’s for sure. But I would say for the next few hours, when something negative popped up, I didn’t feel nearly as irritated as you would expect, and it’s because gratitude was still the overwhelming elephant in the room for me. It eventually wore off, for sure, but I always think about how that level of gratitude is available to me pretty much any time I want it… especially when I’m trying to find a parking spot at the mall around the holidays!
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
OLDIE BUT GOODIE: "I told my sponsor I had a Jeckyll-and-Hyde personality. He said it was too bad that I'd sobered up the wrong one."
(Credit: Grapevine, January 2009, by Vic McM of Florida)
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