A piece of being human is entering a space or situation with prior conceived assumptions. Assumptions about who people are and what they believe as well as more general assumptions about where we will stay and what we will spend our time doing. When our assumptions don’t match reality it’s hard to be excited or grateful. Gratitude has been on my mind since day one of this trip. My friends are back in Goshen where it snowed last weekend and I am in the sunny south, I’m grateful for that. As we moved into our time serving with MDS I have been grateful for many pieces of my experience and one thing I have learned is that we aren’t innately grateful people. In fact when we have worked long days in the Florida heat after waking up at 5:45 am finding things to be grateful for can feel like a challenge. We quickly found that after exhausting days we have shorter tempers and are more likely to snap at each other. When you add the fact that we are all from different friend groups and homes our differences in the ways we do things can accentuate the frustration. To add to that, no one has ever said that building a house is easy, especially when you’ve never done it before.
Gratitude has been essential to keeping morals high and serving with empathy. Personally I’ve found that gratitude is a meditative process that is crucial for a healthy mental state. I find as many things each day to be excited for and thankful for. Here in Florida it has ranged from a sweet comment from a peer to the white beaches and has even been as small as seeing a lizard or chicken or almost any kind of animal or flower. When we are serving gratitude towards each other and for the work that we are doing keeps us moving forward. That means that we have had to choose to say thank you for passing the nail gun and thank you for the delicious dinner. We have learned that when others thank us for the work that we are doing it lightens the work and encourages us to do even more. This has the same effect when we express gratitude towards others. Without gratitude we would be cranky, pessimistic, and whinny, and we have been every one of these and more. But over time and through leadership from Kendra we have learned to look to what we find exciting and to what makes each day special. A few of these things have included small shops in town, kittens, dogs, our MDS leaders, TV time, sleep, and days at the beach. We have grown into gratitude and embraced hard days with thankfulness and optimism.
This is a short poem that I wrote at the end of the first week reflecting on what I was noticing about myself and my own perceptions of service and gratitude.
GRATEFUL
May 6, 2021
Being grateful has been on my mind lately
What does it mean to be grateful
Is it an acknowledgement of how lucky we are?
Or is it more of a meditation that takes time and practice, perception and dedication.
I forget how to be grateful when the world begins to spin just the way I forget to journal when I’m busy.
I don’t believe in grateful people
I believe in people who actively choose to be grateful and who sometimes fail and other times exceed.
I’ve decided that gratefulness isn’t innate, it’s a learned skill that must be practiced to remember
Children have a special ability to stop and take the time to find joy in small pieces of their world and I remembered this about myself when I was more actively struggling with depression
So, in the middle of a time when the world was colorless, numbing and meaningless I choose to find meaning
I started by physically writing a list of what I was grateful for each day.
When the world is a place that you no longer want to exist in this is quite the task.
When nothing seemed to matter it was hard to make myself believe that any piece of my day did.
But i’ve continued
It didn’t “heal” the depression or save me from the depths of my mind but something changed and now I find myself practicing this meditation automatically.
Today was hard, I felt numb and sad, and anxious all at once and yet I was functional and generally okay.
I smiled at the rooster crowing in the middle of the day
I talked to a toad and carried it to safety
I played in the wind out of the car windows as we drove down a beautiful back road
Right now there is a tiny green lizard crawling up a palm tree in the middle of the parking lot
I’m choosing to be grateful
I’m choosing to be grateful and I’m not stopping there.
I’m laughing with joy at the kittens when they claw my shoulder as if holding on for dear life
I’m choosing not to focus on hard or negative pieces of my day
I’m also choosing to welcome all emotions and release all tears because I’m grateful for the deep ways that my body exists
