Sometimes the world is so beautiful I can’t stand it. More accurately, the world is always beautiful, and sometimes I see just how mignificnet it is and it blows my mind.
I conducted an experiment one day, challenging myself to find the smallest, most insignificant thing I could feel grateful for. My attention shifted to the buttons on my shirt. Boring, commonplace, underappreciated buttons. As I focused on them, I saw how simple they were, a no-brainer as far as inventions go. Yet buttons didn’t always exist. Imagine the first person to discover buttons. He/she was probably elated at this newfound convenience. A decorative one to boot!
Then I pictured my shirt missing a button. Gee, I’m glad I’m not missing a button. You know, I actually have hundreds of buttons, and they’re all different! So I went to look at those buttons too. In my closet, I ran into belts and zippers and all sorts of fabrics and colors and designs. Then I notcied the light above my head and the simple switch that turned on this amazing technology. And I was grateful for Thomas Edison and…..
Like a runaway train, gratitude gathered momentum within me. It sped down the track of my mind out of control. I couldn’t stop seeing everything as amazing. I actually had to look away – turn my brain off – for fear that it would crash.
There are days that I repeat this experiment just for the trhill – like a hyped-up child who gets off a rollercoaster and runs right back into the line to ride again. I’m addicted to gratitude high.
The irony is, the more I see that everything matters, the more I realize that nothing does. In gratitude-speak, the fact that I have a chair to sit on is magnificent. The loss of that chair would be grand, too, because the floor would be there for me to sit on. And if I didn’t have the floor, well, the ground would support me and I would be grateful for that. And there it goes again – gratitude taking off with me in tow until I start crying because I can’t fathom the abundance in front of me, and below me, and beside me.
Mark Haddon’s autistic character in The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time observes, “I think there are so many things in just one house that it would take years to think about all of them properly. And also, a thing is interesting because of thinking about it and not because of it being new.”
It sounds silly, but I am grateful to gratitude for showing me how to think about things ‘properly.’ And for coloring my world with so much overwhelming beauty.
Chaos & Clarity 