The gift of gratitude

Generally, in life, a simple problem requires a more or less simple solution. Nothing in the fridge for dinner? Go food-shopping or order takeaway. Device about to die but you're not done using it? Plug it in to charge. The time and energy put into solving small problems are usually in small quantities themselves. Similarly, to solve an immense problem, we feel, requires an immense amount of resources. Manpower, money, and a monopoly on time - nothing less. We throw all including the kitchen sink at whatever tantamount issue faces us, because we have learned subconsciously that if we are presented with a big problem, our response needs to match in size and weight. But what if I told you that one of life’s biggest and scariest threats - the threat being that of a meaningless life - could not be solved, but, at least, eked away at, with the simplest of solutions?

I remember hearing it years ago, probably in my teens, and scoffing, if even. I was not the most self-aware adolescent to begin with, so to even stop and have an opinion of something like expressing gratitude sounds highly unlike me. ‘How on earth’, I may have thought, ‘does saying “I am grateful for XYZ” every morning make this shitstorm called life feel less like a shitstorm? It’s too easy!’ I probably surmised, and I left it at that. Now, apart from a few wobblers with various friend groups in my teens, I didn’t perceive my life at the time as being all that bad, in actual fact. I did very well in school, I was throwing myself into music, my favourite hobby, and I was all set to start college, which was all very fun and exciting.

Fast forward to 2014. I was almost halfway through my degree, living with my best friends in a house in Limerick - not to say that I was loving life, because it was starting to get a bit strenuous in places - but I was oblivious. Oblivious to the fact that the aforementioned shitstorm was brewing and it was coming my way. Within 8 weeks of each other, one of my friends died by suicide, and the relationship I was in at the time ended badly, leaving me feeling hollow, with a fractured sense of self-worth. In hindsight, I can say for sure that this was the first time my life became really hard, and really shit. I was not diagnosed with depression that year but I was definitely dealing with depressive feelings, and I feel it necessary to make that distinction. I lived life at surface level, doing only what I needed to do, and withdrawing whenever I could. Being social, having confidence, having compassion for myself, it was all very laborious, and very draining. I didn’t have enough manpower to weather this storm. I needed help to fight these feelings, and at the time, help was too far away, too costly, too unattainable. I needed a big solution and I didn’t know where to find one.

As I sit here typing this in 2020, I’m struggling to think of how and where I came across that idea again of expressing gratitude. I distinctly remember trying it out in my remaining college years, because even now I can visualise the sunlight peeking through the blinds in my modest room in student accommodation as I lay in bed trying desperately to conjure up three things in life for which I was grateful. At first, it was really difficult - nothing in life seemed worth celebrating. My thoughts were clouded in darkness, like a town whose power has been cut, and here I was walking the streets with a lit match, small and weak; it didn’t feel like enough to restore light or energy to the whole place. I started out expressing gratitude for things like the weather that day, Munster winning a game, or the fact that I had something tasty for lunch - things that now seem minimal and not connected in any major way to my own efforts - but at the time even just to acknowledge them as being a positive in my life was a job. I didn’t remember to practice gratitude EVERY day, but I can testify, hand on heart, that after a few weeks of explicitly and habitually being thankful, I saw the light return again. It sounds too simple but it’s true. Lanterns glowed in windows and street lamps slowly flickered to life. Soon enough, I was able to say “I feel grateful for my friends and the chats we had today on the way home from class”, “I feel grateful for this module, I’m learning so much” and even “I feel grateful for how I handled [insert testing situation here]”. It took a while, but picking up this practice, whenever I remembered of course, was what helped that dark little town, stranded in the blackness without light and hope, eventually become a beacon.

My gratitude practice has evolved over the years, just like anything does if it wishes to stay relevant. I try not to lock myself into gratitude on its own - some days one of the statements might be “I feel happy because”, or “I feel excited about”, because, in fairness, the more positively-tinged emotions to be celebrated, the better, right? I book-end my day thinking of 3 things, and usually they come quite quickly. As often as I can, I try to link my feelings of gratitude or contentment to things over which I have control, as it was when, in those darker times, I was able to celebrate things within my power that I truly felt I was growing as a person, because I could see myself as an agent in my own fortune. The shitstorm was no longer so scary, because I was big enough and smart enough to handle it.

I would like to close this post on gratitude by acknowledging the fact that practicing gratitude daily was just one strategy of many which I used, and still use, to tackle my negative or depressive feelings. The point I made in my introduction still stands - you don’t need an army, or limitless wads of cash, or the patience of a saint, to fight big fights. Gratitude is something small yet powerful, and I encourage you to add it to your self-care arsenal. I hope that beginning the simple practice of naming 3 things each day for which you are grateful will add as much purpose and joy to your life as it has mine. I also appreciate the fact that people everywhere deal with more traumatising and harrowing events than what happened to me that year, but this blog is not a commiseration competition, it is not a sympathy soapbox, it is simply somewhere to talk, to spread ideas and to get conversations happening that may otherwise not have sprung to life.