MINA DIARIES: on gratitude
Some mornings, I wake up and choose three things I’m grateful for and reflect on them. I don’t do it every morning, as was suggested to me by a kind and wise old friend. On certain mornings my mind, once it’s found its foggy transition from dream land to wakefulness, is focused on lists, errands, work duties, responsibilities, some mundane and trivial, others anticipated because of their end results and purpose.
But on the mornings when I practice gratitude, that has its own purpose. Colors seem brighter, my steps seem lighter, the mundane appears to me infused with meaning.
At first I practiced gratitude in what I realize now is a rudimentary way. What am I grateful for? The obvious things, the big things. My family and friends, my boyfriend, my dogs. My home, being alive. That was all fine and good but it wasn’t really making me feel any different. I wasn’t awakened by a sense of peace and contentment, I was just going through the motions of the practice.
Then I began to find the specifics in the general, the little details. I’m grateful for the dog’s cute little tails (one of them just a nub, really), my boyfriend’s bear hugs, the old school snow shoes hanging on my wall. The soft comforting music I play in my studio. I realized this is where I found joy, because they’re all the little things that make the big things whole. It was like listening for individual instruments in a symphony the way my Dad tried to teach me to do.
For some people it seems gratitude comes more naturally, and for others it’s as if it’s practiced subconsciously. It’s like they already hear all the instruments, and hear the whole song at the same time, and it’s a beautiful song. And for still others, through their trials, when the skies are dark and the seas are rough, the beautiful song is still somehow audible — stronger sometimes, even, than the roughness and the darkness. And when you’re in the darkness being tossed around by the sea, these are the sorts of people who can point out the lighthouse in the distance for you, guide you to quiet your mind and listen for a song.
I’ve had the same best friend since high school, and though she spent part of her younger years living down south, we mostly grew up in the same neighborhood. Our two families are like one big family. As the daughter of a single mother and the oldest of six, she was precociously responsible, whereas I was a free-spirited only child with my head in the clouds.
“What do you kids want to be when you grow up?” my Dad asked us one night over dinner.
“I don’t know. Probably a Neo-hippie of some sort,” I said. “Maybe a vagabond.”
“You most certainly do not,” said my mother.
“I’m going to be a senator,” my best friend said, her tone and posture the picture of confidence.
That night we discussed what our lives might look like once we finished high school. We would go to the same college and get an apartment together. She would have her very own room! We would fill the living room with a wall of CDs and DVDs — no old fashioned cassette tapes and VHS for us. And we would each have a car, with a car phone. (It was the nineties.) I would have a white cat named Ivory, she would have a black cat named Ebony.
As it happened, we each went to college out of state, but we returned to our hometown in our twenties and finally got our apartment together. Things were a little different than what we’d pictured. We had a roommate for a while, with two black and white cats. None of us owned any CDs. She had gotten her degree in communications, she was a receptionist on the hunt for a job in her field. I was working at an upscale spa and doing massage therapy part time for the Boston College Eagles. We were on our ways to becoming whatever it was we were meant to become.
Many times I’d come home and find my best friend at the kitchen table next to an accordion folder, an assortment of papers scattered around her. I asked her once what exactly it was that she was doing.
“Organizing my paperwork,” she said happily. “Do you have any paperwork that needs to be organized? I could help you.”
“What paperwork?” I asked.
“Documents, forms, certificates, bills, mail, tax stuff. Do you have a box or do you keep it in a folder?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, and as she looked at me in bewilderment I had a realization that sat in the pit of my stomach. That realization would gradually settle in the recesses of my mind until, years later, I was able to dig it out, dust it off and do something about it.
The worlds of documents, bureaucratic rules and regulations, forms that had to be filled out, filed and organized and brought out at appropriate times, was for the most part a foreign thing for me and I had wanted to keep it that way. I wanted to live simply. But that fear of this aspect of the legitimate real world would hold me back from my dream of owning something like a spa, wellness center, studio, alternative medicine hut or whatever it was I was meant to open.
So it was years later that my perspective shifted and I had my second realization — my best friend had not been burdened by her responsibilities. Many times they were chores, sure, but she actually was grateful for them. She would eventually finish whatever it was she’d set out to do, and it would give her a sense of peace and contentment. In her life she’d had to work hard, so very hard, for everything she had, but the gratitude for achieved goals made it all worthwhile.
I kept all this in mind when I began doing the dreaded paperwork to open the studio. And with each step closer, I felt that same gratitude. I was engaging in the real legitimate world of bureaucratic rules and regulations, and instead of being tedious and horrible, it was meaningful.
My best friend is now a Regional Manager of Marketing for a large company in the city (she may not be a senator, but I’m damn proud of her). She was able to purchase a large condo in a lovely neighborhood. My condo is modest compared to hers, and I’m grateful for that too, because our homes fit us and our accomplishments. When I look at the timeline of our lives and how well we brought everything together to create good things, I can’t help but feeling gratitude.
When skies are dark and the seas are rough, I hope my little studio can be a refuge from that for everyone who comes in the way it is for me. Even if the sky’s just a little cloudy and the seas a bit choppy, I hope people will find my space to be a comforting safe haven, even as a brief reprieve, because sometimes it’s the little things that make a difference.
