"Cultivating Gratitude and Joy"

Been reading from a book called The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are.

An excerpt was fitting.



Scarcity And Fear Of The Dark

The very first time I tried to write about what gets in the way of gratitude and joy,  I was sitting on the couch in my living room with my laptop next to me and my research memo journal in my hands. I was tired and rather than writing,  I spent an hour staring at the twinkle lights  hanging over the entryway into my dining room. I'm a huge fan of those little clear, sparkly lights. I think they make the world look prettier, so I keep them in my house year-round.

As I sat there flipping through the stories and gazing at the twinkle lights, I took out a pen  and wrote this down:

Twinkle lights are the perfect metaphor  for joy. Joy is not a constant. It comes to us in moments- often ordinary moments. Sometimes we miss out  on the bursts  of joy because we're too busy chasing down extraordinary moments. Other times  we're so afraid of the dark that we don't  dare let ourselves enjoy the light.

A joyful life is not a floodlight of joy. That would eventually become unbearable.

I believe a joyful life is made up of joyful moments gracefully strung together by trust, gratitude, inspiration, and faith.

For those of you who follow my blog, you'll recognize this as the mantra for my gratitude posts on Fridays that I call TGIF. I turned this quote into a small badge, and and part of my gratitude practice is a weekly post about what I'm Trusting, what I'm Grateful for, what Inspires me, and how I'm practicing my Faith. It's incredibly powerful to read everyone's comments.

Joy and gratitude can be very vulnerable and intense experiences. We are an anxious people and many of us have very little tolerance for vulnerability. Our anxiety and fear can manifest as scarcity. We think to ourselves:

-I'm not going to allow myself to feel this joy because I know it won't last.
-Acknowledging how grateful I am is an invitation for disaster.
-I'd rather not be joyful than  have to wait for the other shoe to drop.

Fear of the Dark

I've always been prone to worry and anxiety, but after I became a mother, negotiating joy, gratitude, and scarcity felt like a full-time job. For years, my fear of something terrible happening to my children actually prevented me from fully embracing joy and gratitude. Every time I came too close to softening into sheer joyfulness about my children and how much I love them, I'd picture losing everything in a flash.

At first I thought I was crazy. Was I the only person in the world who did this? As my therapist and I started working on it, I realized that my "too good to be true" was totally related to fear, scarcity, and vulnerability.

Knowing that those are pretty universal emotions, I gathered up the courage  to talk about my experiences with a group of five hundred parents who had come  to one of my parenting lectures. I gave an example of standing over my daughter watching her sleep, feeling totally engulfed in gratitude, then being ripped out of that joy and gratitude by images of something bad happening to her.

You could have heard a pin drop. I thought, Oh, God. I'm crazy and now they're all sitting there like, "She's a nut. How do we get out of here?" Then all of a sudden I heard the sound of a woman toward the back starting to cry. Not sniffle cry, but sob cry. That sound was followed by someone from the front shouting out, "Oh my God! Why do we do that? What does it mean?" The auditorium erupted in some kind of crazy parent revival. As I had suspected, I was not alone.

Most of us have experienced  being on the edge of joy only to be overcome by vulnerability and thrown into fear. Until we can tolerate vulnerability and transform it into gratitude, intense feelings of  of love  will often bring up  the fear of loss. If I had to sum up what  I've learned  about fear and joy, this is what I would say:

The dark does not destroy the light; it defines it. It's our fear of the dark that casts our joy into the shadows.


This one's for my battle buddies out there.