Invisible Environment on Nostr: On gratitude: Why gratitude lists fall short. A friend recently pointed to the ...

On gratitude: Why gratitude lists fall short.

A friend recently pointed to the conditionality inherent in gratitude lists. While it is not fruitless to recognize your blessings, material or spiritual, it does not provide a steady ground to walk on. For if your gratitude is conditional on your house, your fridge being stocked, your family being present, then you will struggle to be grateful should those things come to not be.

The awe and the wonder of being itself seems a more fruitful ground floor in the palace of gratitude.

The absolute bewilderment at your existence. How intensely bizarre it is that you are here at all, and how wonderfully beautiful it is that you are.

Engaging the world with your senses, however complete or incomplete they are. Letting the world in, and you into the world. Stepping back, in child like wonder at the sun hitting your skin on a warm beach, or the sub-zero winds stinging as it whips your face.

How insane is it that you get to be here at all? What strange psychedelic trip have you been birthed into?

This is where gratefulness starts for me. When I practice remembering it.

You have to practice remembering it.

Because the car breaks down. The rent is due. Yet another war breaks out, orchestrated by those who refuse to remember the gift of being.

The world is not always aware of the wonderment we all carry and so it will pretend it does not exist, because the world has not practiced remembering.

From this grounding in the gratefulness of being, everything layered on top of it is sacred. The coffee is sacred. The book. A smile. A moment of kindness. Even a moment of anger, and your recognition and examination of it, is sacred.

It is natural that we will forget this.

But it is imperative to continue to practice remembering.

To encounter wonder at every opportunity.

I aspire only to continue to remember.

#gratitude
#philosophy
#writing