The turkey’s tryptophan has now passed out of my body after the Big Meal. Our neighbors’ Christmas lights and balloon Santas are already up on their houses and lawns. I find myself sounding a bit grumpy, more like Ebenezer Scrooge than Tiny Tim. Sometimes this season can feel like too much of a good thing.
The older I get, the less I seem to care about the external signs of holidays. This isn’t something I’ve consciously decided to do. It’s just something I’ve noticed when I think about writing about any holiday.
Take Thanksgiving, for instance. Everybody naturally associates it with gratitude. It is certainly heart-warming to be appreciated and to appreciate others by saying “thanks.” But when my email is filled with hundreds of deals on Black Friday, which now seems to start, at the latest, the Monday before, with no end in sight, there’s a cognitive dissonance that triggers my natural skepticism. Aren’t we mostly just thanking the gods of commerce?
You can understand that this could be an insoluble conundrum. Since I am not naturally a grumpy person and I don’t like to spoil other people’s holidays, I have decided it’s necessary for me to revisit the value of Gratitude and create a practice that feels both honest and sustainable. I know the research. Gratitude is a character strength that can increase our optimism and resilience, and both of those are related to healthful longevity, which is my goal: that pesky ageless mind.
Consistency has never been my strong suite. So, besides honesty, I need to come up with something that will motivate me to actually think about and express gratitude regularly and won’t become rote, boring, meaningless, and ultimately erased from my consciousness.
After much soul-searching, here is my new approach. I have committed myself to the practice of… being thankful for the many things, large and small, that annoy me. This is not as crazy as it sounds. My feelings of irritation turn out to be consistent (therefore helpful) reminders that it’s time to practice gratitude.
Now I pay attention to all the things I am not grateful for. That includes my sinuses, which produce headaches especially in the winter, thanks to a deviated septum. Surprisingly, I have discovered there are fewer things I am not grateful for than I expected. In fact, the things I am grateful for keep popping into my mind, as if to say “on the other hand….” Even the despised plastic Santas seem less tacky because I remember how the parents and kids were laughing together as they set them up.
That memory makes me smile, in spite of my curmudgeonly tendencies, and suddenly another memory pops up of a winter morning around 4 am when I glanced out the bathroom window and saw two live deer nuzzling the two plastic deer on our neighbors’ snow-covered lawn. The scene was surreal, funny, and also touching. Thinking about it now, my chest gets warm, my face softens, my lips lift, and my sinuses feel better. I am suddenly flooded with gratitude that I am still alive to have these memories when many of my friends and family are not. So, counter-intuitive as it seems, I’m learning that the more I pay attention to moments when I feel like complaining, the more naturally my mood flips to the other side of the coin. And since I complain a lot, well, you can guess what the result is.
As I’ve observed this fascinating process – well, it’s fascinating to me anyway -- I’ve come to the conclusion that forming new habits is a highly individual process. As a coach I’ve, of course, drawn on many experts’ ideas about habit change. But, over and over, I have seen that techniques someone else promotes have very limited value unless I put more of my own skin in the game. I’ve learned that I help myself and others best when we focus on putting time and effort into finding an approach that matches our personalities and life situations. It seems self-evident when I say this, doesn’t it? On the other hand, who would have thought that cultivating ingratitude could make a person more thankful?
Copyright 2024 by Lynne Berrett. All Rights Reserved.
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