View from the kitchen window, 6.30am.
Gratitude, a weapon
It could be seen as incongruous, offensive, even, to write gratitude poems during a global pandemic, and I did think this to myself as well, as I was writing them, but what if gratitude is exactly what we need to get us through?
Gratitude will grow resilience in us, it will illuminate what has been right there in front of us all along, it will arm us against depression, illness, and low self-esteem, and it will fill our minds with positive thoughts so there is less room for the bad ones. It’s not about pretending bad things aren’t happening, it is making a choice to hold on to what is good, however tiny we feel it may be. Whatever we have or do not have, we always have a choice to be thankful.
How do you wake up in the morning? Do you spring out of bed with happy thoughts or is it a slower, more laboured affair, involving rolling slowly out of the covers with a moan, or with children standing at the bedside asking for their breakfast? I still struggle to get out of bed, but quite often, after a nice strong tea with half a sugar and 20 minutes to actually wake up, I feel ok. From then on, I have been known to have a ‘sunny disposition’. I’m not sure if this is something I have cultivated or something I was just born with, but I would like to think that I am an optimist at heart even though I have plenty of low moments, and times of loneliness like everyone does. The thing that sets me the right way up, though, is thankfulness. It reminds me time and time again what is important. It reminds me to appreciate the tiniest thing to the biggest thing, and hopefully it makes me feel a little more me, (and I like to think that a thankful me is a real me).
As a fresh uni graduate, I remember getting interview advice from my sister-in-law and she said, ‘At the end of the day, they’ll be considering whether they actually like you and want to work with you’, and I took that piece of advice with me into my first rather intimidating graduate interview. I was trying to go with ‘relaxed’, but I came across as ‘flippant’ they said. ‘Not enough fear’, is what they probably meant. Oh well. I didn’t want the job anyway. I’ve been writing quite a bit about gratitude lately, and it got me wondering whether I believe that gratitude is a weakness or a strength. And what of sunny dispositions and looking on the bright side? Are they fake? Can a cheery outlook be manifested by trying really hard? And will it even help us anyway?
Firstly, I think gratitude is a practice that we can all develop. We may feel that we are more ‘glass-is-half-full’ or ‘glass-is-half-empty’, but gratitude will help us in myriad ways. If we stop to think, and count all the good, and then write it down (this is important – studies have shown that writing it down makes a difference), then it has the power to transform our lives. And we all want this don’t we? Who doesn’t want to be happier? I don’t think we can fake it – stopping to look is stopping to look. If you are taking time to be thankful, then it will be impacting your life. It’s different from happiness though. I’m not saying that because I practice gratitude, I’m blissfully happy all day. You can sometimes be thankful and feel sad at the same time.
Recently, as I was thinking back on this strange timing of writing all these thankful poems during the pandemic, I thought what if we were to learn to see gratitude as a weapon? What if it fortified us to carry on with grit and determination, to keep going through the long, dark tunnel of this virus, through what we know will be a difficult winter, and come out the other side, still smiling (and not in a fake way).? What if we could wear joy like armour? What if a sunny disposition is actually the way to weather dark storms? It’s not that we don’t get knocked down, but that our natural way up is like a flower opened towards the sun, petals like hands, saying thank you. What if gratitude is a lifeboat, something for us to cling to while we weather these storms?
Finding joy in adversity isn’t a weakness, it’s a strength. And it will strengthen us more and more, the more we practice gratitude.
So why not try it for yourself? See what happens when gratitude turns you the right side up.
During the first coronavirus lockdown, I wrote one gratitude poem a day. The poems really lifted my mood and changed my mindset. The poems were successfully funded as a Kickstarter campaign and you can find the book in my etsy shop here.
elisabeth pike 