I chatted with a friend earlier today who told me that he had just stumbled upon my blog and was not sure how he felt about this new "Eat, Pray, Love version of Austin." Those were his words. Apparently, his image of me is decidedly different than the ever-grateful, wholesome-as-the-Mormon-boy-next-door one I portray here.
I have not read Eat, Pray, Love, nor have I seen the movie, but I'm assuming that the woman walks away at the end of the story with some form of wisdom on how to better live her life. (The movie version has Julia Roberts in it, so I really can't imagine how it could end any differently.) As I approach my 50th entry here, I doubt that I have gained any form of wisdom, any insight on gratitude, through this blog.
In fact, I don't think I have changed very much at all. Yet, anyway. I've said it here a few times before, but my frame of mind is mostly the same, my attitudes about life and happiness as they ever were. I had (likely deluded) expectations that I would understand myself better, love harder, be more in tune with the turning of the universe by now.
I don't, and am not. Yesterday, for example, I got home after work feeling pretty good, but somewhere inexplicably between changing out of my work clothes and plopping on the couch, my mood shifted south.
"It" came out of nowhere, and I barely even knew what it was; I could only say that it was this vague idea that the world had done me wrong somehow, that I was angry at something, that I had failed in something in some monumental way. I couldn't describe it, still can't, but I definitely knew when it hit me; I just felt conflicted.
I wanted to read, so I picked up the latest issue of Men's Health and thumbed through page after page but did not absorb a word. I wanted to watch TV, but nothing was on save Scott McGillivray installing some built-in entertainment center for a homeowner's rental property, and I could not have cared less. Sam knew something was wrong too, because he showered me with the attention I normally hound him for. But I just wanted him to leave me alone for five minutes, knowing that I would be frustrated with him if he did. I simultaneously wanted and did not want any- and everything. It felt like the persistent irritation of a sunburn, that intangible discomfort--should I scratch? Rub? Ignore? Just plain go mad? Only I felt like it was all happening just below the surface, and I only had the latter option available to me.
The gratitude journal tells me to accept bad days, feelings that look nothing like gratitude, and understand that they are a part of life. Embarking on this gratitude experiment won't mean that everything will be puppies, rainbows, and unicorns. I will still feel negativity, disappointment, frustration, but the trick is to just go ahead and feel them. Angry? Then feel it. Depressed about something? Feel it. Experience it, know the contours of it so it becomes familiar, and through this recognition, recognize the reasons for it.
That's what the journal says, anyway. It's a little self-helpy for me, but what can I do? I signed on to this for a year.
So while Sam and I ate dinner, I tried to approach my feelings from a logical standpoint, to understand why I was feeling this way and how to best navigate out of it. I did make an concerted effort at conversation and tried my hardest not to make Sam feel like he was the cause of my ire. Very rarely is he ever the cause, but more often, I make him feel like he is by virtue of his proximity. That is something I need to work on.
In the end, I never came upon the reasons for why I felt the way I did. What ultimately brought me out of it, though, was watching an old America's Funniest Home Videos montage of cheerleaders getting dropped after basket tosses (sad that I knew the term without even having to Google it), cheerleaders back handspringing into each other, cheerleaders standing in the wrong place at the wrong time and getting trampled by a stampede of football players. And just like that, I forgot I ever felt bad at all.
I don't think this is what gratitude is all about, but seriously, thank God for hapless cheerleaders and schadenfreude.
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