AnnieModify

Whatever it is, let me start it with gratitude.

Gratitude is fertile ground. Put in the seeds of your dreams and desires. Keep the ground watered and pull the weeds. Soon the seeds will grow.

(Conversely, worry is fertile ground for all your fears. Stay worried and you will harvest an abundance of fears.)

Gratitude has nothing to do with what you have, how good or easy you’ve got it, whether you get what you want or don’t. Gratitude is not concerned with such petty measurements of value, such judgements of experience. Gratitude embraces it ALL, looks at the big scope and opens wide with a YES, with brave willingness to receive every gift, no matter how unexpected.

Gratitude is not just training yourself to notice good instead of bad, to see positive and ignore negative. Gratitude is the skill of finding the good in the bad, highlighting the positive in the negative.

Gratitude removes the need for illusions. You don’t have to act as if you like everything, or pretend that everything is ok, no problem, we’re all fine here. Gratitude frees you from the need for a polished-up societal veneer of happiness.

Gratitude teaches you how to be okay with unhappiness, how to be okay when things are not okay. This is powerful, because then you don’t have to pretend to be happy all the time. You’re able to look at what hurts, voice the pain, start dealing with obstacles and opening up more options.

You can use gratitude to reduce the power that bad situations have over you. Mostly, what we fear is pain. Bad situations are bad because they cause us pain, in one way or another. Gratitude is not a state of ignorance, where you need to pretend that pain is not real. No. Pain is real. Gratitude is the ability to acknowledge the pain, to receive it (instead of resisting it), and to pull the gift from it.

Gratitude knows that there is always a gift.

Gratitude is necessary for acceptance. When you accept without gratitude, you’re submitting to something you don’t value. You’re being passive, surrendering out of fear or frustration. Giving up. That kind of passive surrender either deadens you or pushes you to an opposite reaction, an extreme. Gratitude is an alternative route. It is a balance of acceptance and intention. It is both hands open. Gratitude helps you to accept what others can give, without giving up on what you really want to receive.

Gratitude lets you say, “It’s all okay, even when it’s not,” and actually mean it.

Gratitude helps you relax in the moment, even in the most painful or difficult or uncertain moments. You can only relax in two situations: when you feel fully in control, or when you’re okay with not being in control. The former is always an illusion. Gratitude enables the latter.

The more you practice gratitude, the easier it gets. You get better at finding the good, embracing the whole experience, receiving the gift.

Gratitude is a gentle way to face your fears. No aggression or intense conflict needed. Gratitude doesn’t demand a victory; it just diffuses the power so there’s no longer a threat. That’s a good place to be: free from threat, out of danger.

Gratitude helps you face that deepest fear of scarcity: the fear of not being enough. Gratitude shows you, graciously, over time, how much you are. You send thankfulness outward: for others, for things, for experiences. But gratitude cannot be aimed like an arrow. It is not a weapon loosed but a perspective gained. It’s the way you begin to see what’s already there. It’s a different kind of seeing-is-believing. It’s a reframing, it’s a language that opens up new concepts, enables new and better definition. Of the world, of others, and of yourself. 

Gratitude helps you assign your own meaning to anything that happens. It provides a larger context. It removes the need to pretend or defend: With gratitude, the pain is not an illusion, but it’s also not the whole story. One chapter is not the whole book. Things have happened to you, but you also get to happen to things. Gratitude puts the pen in your hand. Gives you the space to think your own thoughts. Says, “Here. It’s your turn now. What do you want to say?” 

If your well-being matters to you, be your own savior while you can.

— Marcus Aurelius

What we learn as children programs us in certain ways. These programs run subconsciously. They determine our default emotional responses to everything and the meaning we derive from those responses and the behaviors we enact based on the meanings we derive.

Some of these programs served me well in childhood but don’t work for helping me be the person I want to be as an adult.

There are healthy ways to deal with difficult things. Sometimes those are the routes I take. Sometimes I am not taking any routes, I am just sitting in my chair being a glazed donut of a human.

It feels good to remember that’s okay. I don’t have to feel bad about everything.

Being perfect is never a precondition for peace.  Self-acceptance doesn’t come when I do enough but when I realize I am enough.

There are small cycles and big cycles. I know myself well enough to know what I come back to, most of the time. I’m okay with my equilibrium. It tilts this way and that, but it never tilts all the way over. The center can hold.

Or maybe it can’t. Maybe things fall apart, and the center cannot hold, and it’s tumultuous but not apocalyptic.

There’s this option I like to call forming a new center.

It does create vast periods of feeling lost, unmoored, ungrounded. Big feelings, behavior shifting. Generally, lots of swinging and flailing. When you’re in the middle it seems chaotic, and mostly it is, but there’s something else going on too. A planting of feet on new ground. 

Disorientation is just the feeling you have before you get oriented.

Any future perfectly known, said Alan Watts, is already the past.

But life is not in the past. Life is now, life is here, life is this moment.

The only way to live it is to be as truthful as you can be. With others, of course. But mostly with yourself.

Doing anything else is not living or being in the moment. Anything less than truthfulness is an attempt to distort the past or control the future. 

When you’re busy trying to distort or cover or rearrange the past, you’re not in the present. 

When you’re focused on managing and controlling the future, you’re not in the present.

You are in a time that does not exist: past or future.

When you focus on the past or the future, you opt out of existing in the present. As long as you choose to stay there, in the not-now, you don’t exist in the now.

Since now is all that exists, we might say you opt out of existing at all. Until you return to what does exist, the only thing that exists (if anything does): the present, this moment, now.

Our very brains, our human nature, our desire for comfort, our habits, our social structures, all of it, pushes us into being fish bowl swimmers. Tiny people moving in tiny circles. Staying in the circumscribed ruts of our comfort. Ignoring a whole big world of what's different and new and interesting just beyond. 

That's the problem: stuff out there might be new, and interesting, but it's also different. The newness — which is really not new, at all, it's just new to us, so — the differentness, of another mindset or culture, language or belief system, method or opinion or morality or lifestyle, sends our inward threat-o-meter into overdrive. 

We interpret new and different as scary and difficult, because in terms of our emotions and our mental somersaulting, it is. 

We don't know how to act. We don't know how to evaluate. We don't know what is safe. We don't know where we fit in. We don't know how our safe, comfortable fish bowl living is affected by this new, different, expanded puddle. 

Sameness makes us comfortable. And comfort is the height, the very pinnacle, the crowning achievement in our pursuit of happiness. 

What I mean is that we've mistaken comfort for happiness. 

All the ways we could pursue happiness, all the freedom and technology and abilities we have to pursue meaning and joy and interaction and challenge and exploration and improvement and aliveness… All of that, at our fingertips, and being comfortable tends to top the list of what we actually want, what we're willing to put effort towards. 

This seems pathetic. It is pathetic. 

But also: We're working hard all the time in ways we often don't acknowledge. We have infinite options but finite agency. We have endless information access and very little processing power. We get fucking worn out. It's a lot of work to make a string of decent choices for 10 or 12 hours at a time. It's a lot of effort, some days (most days), to do what is required of us to feel like decent human beings, and the idea of putting in more effort, expending more energy, is exhausting. 

So we value comfort highly. We're tired. We're exhausted by constant inputs, invisible demands, and the burden of infinite options. Of course we don't leap out of our comfort zones when the opportunity arises: we've already been out of it for so long, on high alert. 

Our brains are efficiency machines. 

 By valuing comfort so highly, and by equating comfort with sameness, we have programmed our brains to ignore the unfamiliar. Ever wondered why you can feel bored when you have constant stimulation? This is why. 

We carefully allocate our energy to the highest priorities. Things that aren't familiar don't help. So we ignore them.  

Of course, we can't always ignore stuff that is different. Sometimes it is right there, glaringly obvious, annoyingly immune to our discomfort, and we are forced to see it, acknowledge it, encounter it, at least mentally. But don't worry! We have defenses! 

Oh baby, do we have defenses. 

If we can't keep these alien objects from encroaching upon our consciousness, we can, at least, quickly evaluate the threat they pose and deal with them appropriately. 

Threat is precisely how we see things that are different. Comfort is bolstered, even built, by the familiar. All things unfamiliar are threats to our comfort. 

So we're quick to see other groups, philosophies, lifestyles, belief systems, family structures, choices, etc., as weird and wrong. We want to believe they are wrong, because we want to believe that pursuing our own comfort is right. We want to believe we have our priorities in check. Our very desire for comfort creeps into our logical reasoning, so deeply does the desire go. So insidiously does it carry out its programmed mission: to keep us from being uncomfortable, our brains will subvert objectivity and keep us from seeing the fallacies in our own thinking, keep us from recognizing that we are, at heart, selfish and misguided creatures whose greatest delight is sitting around and feeling pretty good about ourselves. 

If needed, then, we will happily sacrifice the validity and value of every thing, person, or choice that is different from what we know and define as normal. We will, for the sake of our own rightness, define all different things as wrong. We don't even hesitate. Hesitation is a sign that you might be starting to see the truth of your own motivation. If you start hesitating before defining, before casting judgment, before categorizing and labeling, look out: your comfort is at stake. Your brain is scurrying, be sure of it, to come up with great reasons for you to resist this awful urge to be fair. 

Fair. Fair? Fair! Fair has no place in the pursuit of comfort. 

Equality is not a factor here. If we value all people equally, we must admit that our own comfort is not the highest priority. We must admit that others, too, have valid needs, valid ideas, that the fact of their differentness is not adequate reason for us to deny them the same respect and autonomy we demand for ourselves.

We can't have that. That sort of thinking gets us in trouble. That sort of thinking demolishes the layer upon layer of defensive triggers and traps that we have laid, so carefully, over the entire course of our lives. We are aware, so very aware, of how it could all fall apart. We know the reasons are thin. We know, deep down, the very idea of a fish bowl is absurd. We live in an ocean, and it's big, and it's full of creatures, and we're terrified. We want to believe we can limit what is around us. We want a fish bowl so we can feel like the biggest fish in it. 

It is the only way we know to feel safe. 

But there is another way: to see, first, that the fish bowl is an illusion of our own making, with imaginary walls upheld by discriminatory defense systems. If we can begin to see that the walls are not even real, we can see a way out. Maybe we can stop putting so much work into keeping them in place. 

It's scary. 

It is being alive. 

The threat only exists when we think we have something of our own, something utterly more important than all else, to protect and defend. But we don't. 

We are swimming in this together, all of us. 

There is no safer ocean, only this one. 

After reading¹ the recent news about the unsurprising lack of diversity in podcasting —

64% of the hosts of the most popular US podcasts of 2024 were men…Shows with video are more likely to have male hosts; the worst gender balance is with business and technology podcasts, where men host 92% of shows.

— I have decided to start my own business and technology podcast (with video) to help balance this dreadful imbalance². 

Please enjoy. Show transcript available upon request³.

Don’t forget to like, subscribe, share, burn it all down, etc. 

1. Thanks to Chris for sharing this, which I otherwise would never have seen because I don’t follow podcasting at all but I am sucker for reports about anything especially when I am procrastinating on actual work I should be doing which is really what this entire post is all about. 

2. I can only help with the gender aspect. Better than nothing, I guess. 

3. Transcript:
   Dramatic intro music. Eyes. Nodding authoritatively. Pause. Thump. Coffee slurp. Coffee sigh. “Today in business-tech podcast we’ll look at the state of business and tech. Business: bad. That’s right. Tech: Also not good. Tune in next time. “

I was feeling sad and overwhelmed and unmoored yesterday so after work I didn’t go to the gym or get groceries or any of the other things I should do.

Instead I drove to the park and walked in circles around the pond. 

I was still sad but outside sad is better than inside sad. 

The nice thing about being outside is that you can feel smaller. And if you’re smaller, the sadness is smaller. 

When I was a kid, I was lucky enough to live in rural places. Homes on country roads that fed into woods, creeks, fields. I did a lot of exploring and fort-building and tree-climbing, alone and with friends.

As an adult, I have discovered that no matter where I go, I feel at home, at ease, as soon as I’m around trees. That’s a superpower. 

My hiking buddy¹ and I talk about sadness often while we walk around in the woods. How scary it is. How much we fear it. How it feels like it will swallow us, eat us up. How it feels bigger than other emotions. How it feels like a place you will never leave. 

But all sadness needs is to be felt². Not ignored. Given a moment, a little space. 

My default reaction to sadness used to be: Box it up tight, tuck it away, pretend like it isn’t there. This is not helpful. It leaks out, disguises itself, gets stale and dense and brittle. Better to feel the sadness as it comes, in waves, instead of freezing it into sharp-edged pieces rattling around inside. 

To me, it feels safer to be sad outside. Like I can let it well up and  leak out and there’s room for it to be big and there’s still room for the rest of me. The trees and the ground and the sky are a witness, a reflection, a reminder that I have existed before and will keep existing. That nature is truth and I am part of it. That even where there is no path, I can find my way.

1. Jenn. We became close thru hiking together. Now, even though our friendship is much more than that, I still refer to her as my hiking buddy/friend which is a term of endearment and respect. 

2. I am referring to regular garden-variety sadness, not depression. Sadness is a feeling. Feelings are temporary. Depression is a persistent mental health condition. Big big difference.