Why is it so hard to feel grateful? I think possessing a sense of gratitude is a very important facet of staying grounded because when we are grateful for the things that have been bestowed upon us, we are actually taking the time to understand where we have been blessed (instead of focusing too much of our attention on things that have not gone our way). Much as our coming into being was a series of improbable incidents, the fact that more things have landed in our way (which we fail to recognize, and usually without gratitude) is something that escapes me.
There are many ways in which you can count yourself unlucky and then there are many ways in which you can count yourself lucky. The side you choose to focus on decides how positive and open to new experiences you are versus how fearful and closed you become.
Fear is paralyzing and fear compounds itself. Fear feeds on itself. The more you focus on things that have not gone your way, the more you tend to curl up inward and adopt a mindset of fear towards things: towards trying new things, new experiences, a new job, moving to a new location, experimenting with a new type of education, etc.
If you find yourself closing out on these new experiences, it compounds the fear that you have. The fear keeps growing till the point that you start recognizing patterns where it did not exist. You start assigning blame to yourself and to others and you constantly call yourself unlucky.
I’m not denying luck. Luck is an important facet of our life. You make your own luck but in many cases your luck makes you. There is undeniably an element of luck that shapes everyone’s lives.
That does not mean that those who did not get so lucky or unlucky are unlucky. The absence of luck does not make you unlucky. The absence of luck makes you open to a new kind of experiences and a different kind of luck. You just have to frame your mindset differently to find out where you did indeed get lucky and where you did not.
If you expect yourself to be lucky in all domains of life that you play with and are a player in, then that’s a false expectation. Even for people who have been incredibly successful at their chosen pursuit, it has always, always come at a cost. You bear the burden of that decision or the choice that you made by giving up the cost of pursuing your obsession or pursuing the thing that made you lucky.
Having gratitude towards life is a small but in my mind positively self-reinforcing behavioral shift that you can make. It’s easy to do but hard to internalize the value it provides. Most people tend to think of gratitude as that mushy thing that you do to keep yourself calm and as part of a meditative journey but it’s not just calming down your mind. It’s about adopting a view towards the world that is more open, more encouraging, more positive, and more exposed to opportunities than you otherwise would.
Think about all the things that have gone towards making you the person you are. Think about all the things that have gone well towards not turning you dead. Think about all the things that you used to dream about when you were a kid, and now that you have it you no longer care about them and you want more, more and more.
Being grateful, if you are true to it, will, over the long run, make you feel more content about the life that you have been served. You can choose to be content or you can choose to stay happy while pursuing the things that you do want to pursue, knowing that the pursuit itself is the destination (and not the destination itself or the outcome itself). It’s in the journey that true happiness lies and if you are grateful you’ll recognize that this journey that you are able to undertake is itself something that you should find yourself feeling lucky for.
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