Have you found yourself praying: “if only this happened, I’d be grateful?”
Well, I have. Praying for a job desperately only to start asking myself “why do I have to work again?”
This made me wonder, do we stop being grateful because we stopped being grateful or can we still be grateful when we don’t feel grateful?
My life changed the day I encountered the phrase “toxic positivity.” This happiness- against- all- odds, no room for negativity banner, brandished as the riot declaration of being a happy person.
The thing is happiness is real, and like every other real thing, it is capable of fading. Nothing is more real about life than the ability to lose it.
Being alive is the conscious reminder that we can also be dead. Not to be grim or anything of sort, but I hope you catch my drift.
How toxic positivity became real to me was when I had to live through it. Wanting to be sad but arguing about why sadness is not a vibe for a positive person. Wanting to share my fears genuinely with a friend but with so much glittering motivation every where, there was no room to unpack the ugly. It makes an incredible moment of vulnerability laden with disappointments of being a Debbie downer.
It was through this experience I started to query why happiness cannot be a neutral room where we can safely unpack our deepest self. What is so enthralling about light in an already lit room?
It is the very darkness we escape that evokes the light we carry. I think light is darkness answered prayers.
we must first learn to be a safe space for ourselves, to look at the gaping abyss, to fall knowing there’s light beneath the fall.
Then you may ask, what if light never comes? It is simple, then, we wait.
Do you know that phrase “hope never fails“, I recently got insight to it meant when I realized that hope never fails because after hope is hope. How can it fail when it never stops nor end? There’d always be something to hope for and we will have to keep traipsing from hope to hope continually.
Dearest reader, I know you see yourself reflected in these words because I see myself too. They are reflections of different states of languish.
Though every emotion we experience may be fleeting, may appear just to disappear even as we are born to die, it does not detract from all the moments that shape us.
I think to answer the question prompting this post. It is okay to be grateful and then, not grateful and then, grateful again. All the moments spent in gratitude is never wasted or non existent simply because we stopped.
I think the fitting word is mindfulness. Sometimes, we aren’t mindful of the things that brings us gratitude or joy, at other times we are just distracted by so many different things and as humans we tend to focus on things we lack as oppose to the many ways we are fortunate.
If nothing else, let this be a positive nudge on gratitude. Even when there is seemingly nothing to be grateful for, the ability to hope is definitely worth gratitude.
Xoxo,
Dcconnoisseur.
Connoisseur of Memories 