Gratitude is hard for me sometimes

Note: This was originally a guest post for Sam’s Appreciation Revolution. You should check it out.

I’m an extremely lucky person. Really. Sometimes I can’t even believe how lucky I am. I have the best mother, best job, best boyfriend, best condo, best everything.

And yet still, I want. I still have that hunger for more. Selfishly, I am often found in dark corners brooding over the infallibility of life, the unfairness, the annoyances, and over that stupid guy who cut me off this morning in the white Dodge Ram with a ladder strapped to the top and a license plate forever seared in my memory. I did not feel lucky that I didn’t skid off the road to my untimely death. I just wanted to hurt him.

In retrospect, I do feel grateful, immensely grateful, that when I sped up, tailed, and yelled obscenities at the man in the Dodge Ram, that we were going sixty-five miles per hour and there’s no way he could have heard me. I’m grateful that at the last moment I decided not to show him the slender nature of my middle finger. I’m grateful that my exit to work arrived before I really gave him a piece of my mind. I imagine – as he well should be – he was grateful as well.

This is the ugly side of appreciation, the not so fluffy and pillowy kind. There are chapters of my life when I am overcome with the sweet and sugary kind, when I am surrounded by rainbows and treats and sparkly revelations. But mostly, I have little patience for swaths of gratitude to envelop me.

Gratitude is hard for me sometimes.

I imagine it’s hard for most people, even the big teddy bears of appreciation. It means accepting a whole litany of injustices and bending your eyesight towards what is beating both in and outside of you simultaneously to which, I’m sure, only the heartfelt natures of Gandhi or Mother Theresa have fully mastered. It means not being afraid of the past, the future and the ever-so vast present, because really, gratitude is about living in the now.

So, you could write about the things you are happy for daily – which I do. Or, you could take a moment every Monday morning to reflect upon the previous week, which I do. Or, you could look up at the ceiling occasionally, through the drywall, up through the six floors above you and up to the roof, all the way through the clouds and at the sky and say, “thank you.” I do that too.

Or you could just drive to work like you do every day, embracing the good, the bad, and the dick in the Dodge Ram. Sometimes, that’s gratitude too.