I was talking to a friend the other day. She was talking about the hard stuff she's faced in life. She said she was grateful, though, because she knows a lot of people have faced harder.
That used to be my gratitude practice. Acknowledging that things could be worse. And although it is true that someone out there is always facing something harder than me - that gratitude practice left me stuck. Because when you come to believe one of the most beautiful qualities of where you are is that you aren't where someone else is, you can begin to lose hope that life will ever be anything else. You begin to accept that your life is good because others have more bad. I've lived most of my life like my friend. Quick to acknowledge that life has been hard. Quicker to acknowledge that it could be much worse. The last few years, well maybe they've been some of the hardest in a hard life. But I've come to accept a couple of things about hard - and about gratitude. One - the magnitude of someone else's struggle has no relationship with the magnitude of my own struggles. And so two - the starting place for looking at my struggles, and for building my own sense of gratitude, starts by looking at my life, not anyone else's. The last few years, I've shifted my gratitude practice. No longer is it 'things could be worse than they are.' Instead, my gratitude practice these days is challenging myself to see that 'things are better than they seem.' I've recognized that I have a tendency to layer struggles on top of struggles in my life. That has happened because when something doesn't go just right, I start to imagine all the other things that won't go right. When something doesn't feel just right, I start looking for other areas in my life that don't feel right. And pretty soon, I have imagined a struggle much more significant than the struggle actually is. So gratitude these days is: "I have this struggle, but I." Gratitude these days is no longer: "I have this struggle, and." I have this struggle, "but I" get to see my boys tonight. I have this struggle, "but I" get to use the gift of writing to feel more at peace. I have this struggle, "but I" have friends who aren't afraid of my struggle. I have this struggle, "but I" am not afraid of it either. You see, the 'but I' keeps us from layering struggles. Because when we say I have this struggle 'and' - what follows is often additional struggles we imagine and not real blessings we could be counting. Counting blessings in the middle of a struggle stops the layering. It helps us constantly remind ourselves that maybe life is more beautiful than we've imagined it to be. And when you can remind yourself that life is more beautiful than you've imagined it to be, you suddenly have hope that it always can be. When you practice finding more beauty and not imagining deeper hardship, you find more beauty. The biggest source of hope for more beauty isn't that someone else has less of it than you, but that you have gotten better at seeing the beauty you already have. Happy Thanksgiving dear friends. Find the beauty in your life, even if it means looking through the lens of struggle. And please know, as I look through both the lenses of struggle and of peace in my life, I see you all there. You are beauty. Thank you and have a very happy Thanksgiving.
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Robert "Keith" CartwrightI am a friend of God, a dad, a runner who never wins, but is always searching for beauty in the race. Archives
February 2025
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