6/15/2011 - define gratitude. . .

Today is officially the midway point of my 'grateful year.'  To say that I am proud of myself is an understatement, that the time flew by effortlessly, a lie.  I've had days where I sat in a stupor of frustration, mounting to something akin to panic: what if I can't think of anything today?  What if nothing good, nothing bad, just nothing worth recounting happened to me?  How can I possibly keep this going for x more months?

Yet, barring the two days I took off from this blog during my vacation to Palm Springs, I have always come up with something.  That said, I hold no illusions that any of this daily work resulted in eloquent pieces of profound prose.  As an English major, I honed a skill through my college years that I never saw listed on any syllabus: the art of bullshitting, and while I may not be the most well-read, and I sometimes need to Google the proper usage of certain words (lay vs. lie being a particularly difficult pair), I am a master of bullshit.  Hell, I remember two (which means there likely were others) analytical essays I wrote on novels I never even bothered reading.  (And to my credit, I did pass those classes. . .)

But, six months and 164 blog entries later, the real question is this: what have I learned?  And not in the way of writing, but what have I learned about gratitude?  I wish that I could say with certainty (or 'certitude,' if I was a sexting politician) that I have reached a deeper understanding of goodness, that I, in my body, carry with me a more firmly rooted sense of good.  But alas, no certitude here.  I still get angry over trivial matters, still catch myself thinking thoughts that simmer with negativity.  I don't feel any more thankful as a whole than I did last year when gratitude was a fortune-cookie concept.

I used to think that gratitude, in its abstract form (not, for example, thanking someone for a Christmas present or holding the elevator), was like an intangible debt owed to the universe, to 'God,' in whatever incarnation he may exist.  When I used to semi-regularly go to church, I remember members of the congregation expressing how blessed their lives were because of some fortune or other that had been bestowed upon them, whether it be a new job after a bout of unemployment or a seemingly miraculous recovery from sickness.  They acted as if God was in control the whole time, and they were out of control; their gratitude stemmed from a steadfast belief that God gave them their new jobs, healed them, held them in his arms and loved them, so they were thankful.

My idea of gratitude, then, was defined by religion, but skeptic that I am, I saw this angle as nothing more than a reason to abdicate any effect one might have on this world, and any the world might have in return--to, in a sense, leave this world completely but in body.  If all is out of our hands, then what role do we have to fill other than that of marionettes, dangling on strings and acting out the wills of an unseen other?  I just can't believe that my purpose in life is to bend to the unknown wills of an unknown director and then turn around and call the good stuff gratitude. 

To rebel against this notion of gratitude and God being intricately tied, I decided to focus on specificity in this blog, on individual moments of gratitude and positivity that come my way.  I set out this aggressive timetable, and it forced me to constantly think of and take note of the things I am glad to have in my life, the little things that happen to me throughout my day that make me pause, smile, laugh, and be thankful that I was a part of it.  Every day, I seek these things out in order to write about them.  Some days, I find this task easier than on others, but I am always looking, and I always find.

So what have I learned?  That gratitude does not equate to becoming an inert bystander to all that the world has to offer (and strip away), to define gratitude by a set of guidelines laid out in the Bible, in philosophy, in anything actually, because I am beginning to think it means the exact opposite--that gratitude is to actively define your own version of it, to participate and interact with the world, to see yourself clearest when it is reflected in all of the surrounding good, of which there is so much.

(Update: I'm apparently an idiot who can't read calendars and do math, so the timing of this post is off.  Guess it just is what it is now. . .)