Liberty Tells Me to Be Grateful
Why is it so hard for me?
I have heard it so many times: focus on gratitude. Keep your thoughts positive. Positive energy attracts positive energy, and negative energy attracts negative energy. If your thoughts are negative, negative things will be attracted to you. Cultivate grateful thoughts. I took a course two years ago that spent a couple of months teaching me how to be grateful. I had to write down 5 things every day that I was grateful for. I had to keep positive mantras taped to my bathroom mirror and read them aloud to myself every morning.
Why is it so hard for me? Because while I’m being grateful, bad things will be happening behind me that I’m not paying attention to. Problems will arise that I need to solve, but I won’t solve them because I’m too busy being grateful to see them.
Responsibility. Duty. Failure. Fear. While I’m saying, “Thank you,” the bad guys will be lining up behind me, and I won’t be prepared to deal with them. I need to be on guard constantly, and I can’t do that if I’m just walking around in a gratitude cloud.
It’s not that I’m not grateful for all the wonderful things in my life. I am. But good things don’t need to be changed, don’t need to be worked on, don’t need to be solved. Good things don’t need as much attention.
A therapist told me when I was in my thirties that I had suffered enough loss for twelve lifetimes. Hah! In the thirty plus years since then, those losses have been doubled, maybe tripled. But there have been gains, too. Why can’t I focus on those?
Every morning, I’m told again and again, I should wake up grateful for another day of life. First of all, I am not a morning person, and I’m grateful if I just find the bathroom and then the kitchen. I’m grateful that I can find my grape/cranberry juice and my cigarettes. (Don’t start. I’ve heard it all. I’m no quitter.)
My mind starts to thaw, and I think about what projects I have for the day. The unpleasant ones are always uppermost, because they are unpleasant, and I dread them. My gratitude comes when I remember it’s Tuesday or Thursday, the days I get to talk to my cousin for an hour or so.
Different day, different problems to solve, different chores to take care of. Am I grateful when the floors look clean? Yes, for the five minutes it takes for a dog to throw up or come in with dirty paws, or make a pile. It all seems like the same things I dealt with yesterday and the day before. I feel like I’ve been waiting for good news for so long, I wouldn’t recognize it if it bit me.
And when there is good news? I am grateful; I express gratitude, and then I go right on looking for the next problem that needs to be solved and wonder if I’ll be capable of solving it, or it will be too much for me, or it will take hours, days, weeks, maybe months to solve. Hell, I still haven’t gotten my income tax refund for 2020.
I am grateful. I truly am, and I let the Creator know that every chance I get. I try even to be grateful for all the “challenges” I face every day. When I was busy and working, I used to feel like those acrobats who kept the plates spinning. Now I feel like there’s just one big plate, and instead of rushing around to keep a lot of them spinning, I’m just standing in one place, spinning that same damned plate over and over.
I guess I’ll try to be grateful I have a plate. I’m trying. Very hard. I have many things to be grateful for, but I can’t ignore the beasts that lurk all around me. I have to be on the look-out and be ready when they come. And I know they will. They always have.
I’m either very strong or very scared. But I AM grateful. Just not all the time. If that’s not good enough for the universe, so be it. It’s the best I can do. For now.
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