Seasons of gratitude can be so powerful. The personal practice of giving thanks is perhaps the most potent ritual one can privately embody.
To see abundance, after all, even in the darkest storm, is often enough to feel abundance.
At the same time, the public pressure to exhibit gratitude, as if it were a rite of passage, can have the opposite effect.
As if it’s a state of mind we are supposed to maintain. The type of person we are supposed to be. A warm feeling we are supposed to set free. To be happy, thankful, and positive. To have thriving families, rewarding careers, gorgeous partners, and healthy bodies. You know, the things for which we ought, and are taught, to be grateful.
Sometimes, it’s simply not our state—of mind, of emotion, of spirit. And that’s okay.
It’s definitely okay in 2020. So if you feel like a foreigner in the face of public potlucks of “giving thanks,” you’re probably not alone.
But. We know gratitude has a magic power. So where, then, ought it dwell? And dwell it must.
When we step out of the public square and into our private spaces, there is a freedom there, a free-flowing room that only your mind inhabits. And in that room are belongings that only you can see. And when you pick them up, one by one, and call them by their name, gratitude is nearly inescapable.
Your loved ones. Your body. Your memories. Your potential. Your interwoven existence with others. Your intentions. Your strengths, and even your weaknesses.
Only you know that room. Only you see its contents. This Season, and all Seasons, let us dwell in that room daily. Quietly. Authentically. Humbly. Silently. Intimately.
We don’t need public permission to be grateful. We also don’t need its pressure. Let it happen in your own way with your own audience—you and those you love closely.
And also, shout it from the rooftops when you desire. As a society, we are already shouting, so it may as well be about gratitude.