This morning I was journaling and didn’t have much to say, so I started writing a gratitude list. When in doubt, or when you have no inspiration at 5am, just practice a little gratitude. People talk about gratitude all the time these days. It’s such a buzzword. But, if I want to be honest, which I like to be, I must admit that hearing the word gratitude used to make me throw up in my mouth a little bit. Yup, in a nasty nutshell, that’s how negatively that word made me feel. In my early days of recovery, that’s all I heard. Gratitude, gratitude, gratitude. Blah, blah, blah. It was an empty annoying word for me and every time I heard it, which was like a bazillion times a week, it was a reminder that I didn’t actually have a lot of it. Not very much at all. I had a lot of problems and depression and no more vodka, so I wasn’t quite at the gratitude stage that a lot of the others around me had graduated to. Which is totally fine. Totally normal. I think that’s why sponsors tell you to make a gratitude list every day. Or mine would tell me to do it when I was feeling especially down on myself and my life, which was at least once a week that first year. I think it’s also really easy to forget how much there is to be grateful for. Like way too easy. Mindblowingly easy. At least it was for me. I wrote list after list after list. As time went on, I began to realize that I actually felt a little bit better after writing my lists. It made me realize a lot of things. The biggest thing being that it feels amazingly good to feel grateful. I didn’t have much to cling onto those days, but I had a good job, I was making new awesome friends, laughing and having some fun without drinking. What?! It was crazy, I tell ya. Back in the beginning, my sober friends and I would hang at the Metro Diner in Arlington, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes until at least 2am every weekend. It was awesome. We were like family. A happy, shiny, sober kind of family and I was so very grateful for that. I couldn’t have done it without them. Things were messy in the beginning. My living situation was messy. My mind was messy. My hair was messy. So. Much. Messy. But I had hope. My sober friends gave me hope when I couldn’t find it on my own. The fellowship saved my life. Grateful doesn’t even begin to describe what I felt and still feel for those people. Even though our lives have gone in different directions, they are forever in my heart. Forever with me. That’s the miracle of connection. Unity. Human bonds created over pure soul instead of booze are the strongest bonds we can make. Soul to soul. No masking of our true selves. When you can become brave enough to put yourself completely out there, you’ll be amazed at the stellar people you can attract into your life.

Ok, now a lot of time has passed since those early sobriety days, and a lot of miracles have happened, but I still get grumpy, angry, dopey, sleepy and like the rest of those dwarfs I can’t recall at the moment. My mind is full of little demon dwarfs that I must slay on the daily, but when I do the work, I experience the joy of results and happier, freer living. It’s always win win when you take the time for some spiritual practice, such as writing a gratitude list. I write them all the time, and say a lot of them in my head when I’m driving. It’s fun. Do it whenever you can. A great way to start your day is by writing one of these magical little lists. Train your mind right upon waking to focus on the beauty and wonder of this life. You have been given a multitude of gifts by just being alive. You are so lucky to be here; to have your unique, soulful expression come forth in this physical body so that it can expand and grow and love and create. But, to be fair and realistic, a mind does not just become immensely and ecstatically grateful overnight. It takes practice. Daily practice. Like I said before, I gagged when I used to hear the word gratitude in the beginning. I hated it. But I was a desperate human. A sad human. A human who needed to figure out how to stay alive and like it, so I listened to the suggestions given to me. And they began to work. As I wrote things down again and again, I found myself really feeling grateful for them. Like to some people I know, it may have looked like I had nothing, but to my slowly opening heart, I was able to see that I had a lot. I was okay. I had hope. All was not lost. I just had to take the time and apply some focused mental energy on what I had to be grateful for. And let me tell you, one gets rather creative with her gratitude lists when she’s sleeping on a shitty futon and living with addicts who are up all night on meth. My life was not always magical, but even surrounded by darkness, I managed to find some light. So if your life is not all unicorns and rainbows at the moment, no worries. With some simple work, you can get your mind feeling a touch of gratitude, which if you keep at it, will grow over time.

I moved out of that shithole with the crazy roommates a few months into my recovery. Things began to shift for me. But nothing was going to really change unless I got my mind working a bit better. At some point, I had to stop feeling sorry for myself and the mess I was in, if I really wanted things to change and improve. Gratitude helps with that. It’s a practice. I practice it almost every day and I feel my energy change when I do. Just keep doing it and doing it and you will feel it, too. Gratitude, real honest to goodness gratitude, takes some time to generate and maintain, that’s why it’s a good idea to write a list daily. It literally takes 2 minutes. We all have 2 minutes to think of why we are grateful to be alive. I mean, c’mon. When you do this daily, you’ll begin to see how much you really do have. That all is not lost. That you are not lost. It is a powerful, worthwhile practice. It’s changed my life. I no longer get nauseous when I hear the word gratitude because gratitude helped save my life. Yup, it is that powerful. Don’t take my word for it. Practice it yourself and see how it grows. How you will grow.

p.s. You don’t have to be in recovery to benefit from writing gratitude lists. This world is full of miserable people who don’t drink or do drugs. A lot of folks just suffer with a constant low grade fever of pessimism and negativity and could really use a shift in perception (aka attitude adjustment). Gratitude lists work for everyone. Quite possibly even you.