I promise this is not a preachy, everyone should just smile, then love and laughter and butterflies will follow. While there is nothing wrong at all with love, laughter, and butterflies, there is something to say about smiling when we don’t feel like it, or society’s pressure to gloss over pain.
Living with gratitude can sound like a burden to someone who has escaped an abusive marriage, or someone who is living with a long-term illness, or suffering in physical or mental pain. Telling someone to smile while suffering can feel like a cold slap in the face.
What I’ve been learning through my survival of life—and to be truthful, there are a few times that I should be dead, and somehow I am not: is that living with gratitude is not faking happiness at all. Or forcing happiness when we feel like crying or we happen to be angry.
Living with love and gratitude is about stepping back from our painful experiences and making even the tiniest space in believing in something within ourselves, that we are worthy of love, worthy of being seen, that we are separate from the pain we’re living in. Gratitude and love can start by making the tiniest spark of kindness and forgiveness—to ourselves.
You know that saying ‘everything happens for a reason’? Some people live by that and there are tons of religious and spiritual arguments and justifications for why that is so.
But. I would never tell someone who is suffering grief, or is a victim of abuse or violence, or struggling with debilitating physical or mental disease, that their pain is ‘for a reason.’ That sounds insufferably judgmental at best and straight up cruel at worst. I don’t personally proscribe to that train of thought, i.e. that children should be trafficked because it happens for a reason. Eff that. I understand that it makes for a great linear story, that I suffered a great deal, I overcame it, and now I live happily ever after and ride off into the sunset. Life is more complicated than a nicely fit feature film or tidy story. And, life is honestly rarely linear.
I struggle with that “everything happens for a reason;” I do not embrace that human suffering exists in the world because it makes for people with privilege to feel comfortable with it, if it ‘happens for a reason.’ I’m also not saying folks who have great lives are responsible for the suffering in the world, I am saying that we can all recognize injustices and hold in our hearts space for empathy when we see it, instead of explaining it away as some ‘big picture.’ To add love and peace and kindness instead of shrugging our shoulders and saying, oh well, that’s that. We do not know each other’s journey, but we can be kind and work on loving ourselves as we heal and make our way through our own.
(Also. There is a difference from individuals who say and believe that what happened in their own lives ‘happened for a reason’—that is their call and ownership of their own story. I am differentiating individual stories who embrace that, from the overall, glossy, global concept that all suffering happens for a reason.)
And while there is terrible suffering in our lives, there is also, the tiniest space for us to scrape out a place of healing. Sometimes, we can miraculously break out of the pain and welcome in light by the floodgates. Other times, it can be the smallest act of kindness either to ourselves or to someone else—just one small phrase or whisper: I believe in you. You are worthy of love.
Big or small, being kind to ourselves and others is a miracle that makes a difference in our divided world. And that is the start of living with gratitude.
I am grateful to have woken up to a new day. There may be challenges ahead, but I am doing my best to meet them, and my goal today is to add a little kindness to the world.
Love,
Jane Thrive
