This post was started last week but I never finished it. It was kind of cheesy and trying to be clever but things changed this morning. Without getting into dramatic details, at 5:30 am I was outside trying to adjust a tarp when a 15 pound dumbbell fell around 8 feet and hit me in the back of the neck/head. More neck than head...which is where the gratitude comes in. An inch or so higher and it likely would have knocked me out and potentially worse. I am grateful.
For the last eight months or so I've been starting every day like that. Not the getting hit in the head part but the "I am grateful" part. I write it down in a little notebook. I write down a list of things that I'm grateful for. Over this eight month period I've noticed a pretty dramatic shift in my day to day. It turns out that if you start your day thinking about the things that you're grateful for, you kind of keep thinking about being grateful. Obstacles that come up during the course of the day have less of an impact. Standard day to day occurrences have a different effect as you will start to notice how blessed you are with the tiniest event. In short, there is ALWAYS something to be grateful for just as there is always something you can be sad, angry or bitter about. It's a choice. For the majority of my life, I chose the latter. I didn't really know how to be grateful. I chose to focus on the parts of life that I was angry about. It wasn't like I was constantly an angry, bitter or sad person but there was always this underlying energy of resentment or bitterness waiting to come out when any little thing went wrong. You could say that I had a short fuse. My goal was to try and build a happy life that never threatened to light that fuse. I got pretty good at it too. I could go days and sometimes many weeks protecting that fuse but, inevitably, something would spark it. I couldn't see it then but it's painfully obvious now. I'm not saying that I never get angry or sad anymore but it's different...especially the anger. Anger is an occasional, fleeting emotion now that I'm able to see from a different perspective. I'm able to step back and analyze why something made me angry and then be grateful for the outcome.
After that dumbbell hit me this morning, I was angry. I was angry that I let it happen, that I I didn't foresee the possibility, that I'm now in pain and have a ton to get done today, the list goes on but, in a very short period of time, I was able to change my perspective and be grateful that I was still alive. Maybe that sounds dramatic but eight months ago I would have wallowed in my anger for hours and let it ruin the entire day. This major shift in my behavior simply because I started being grateful. It sounds simple and obvious but, for me, it wasn't. I faked it at first. I didn't feel any emotion behind it but I stuck to it. After about a month or so, I started to feel it. I felt an overall change in my attitude which led me to more gratitude. Six months in and I was truly shocked by the change. It's difficult to explain but I highly recommend you give it a shot.
Or don't...keep in mind that I got hit in the head pretty hard today so who knows what I'm rambling on about.
