Thank you, hard things
This Thanksgiving weekend, I’m thinking of all I have to be thankful for. I have my health , my family, my partner, my dog. I have the support, space and time to embark on this new vocation of counselling. I am very, very lucky.
And it strikes me that these are the low hanging fruit on the gratitude tree, the no-brainers to be grateful for, so to speak.
Where it gets more difficult is contemplating the crap things that have happened in our lives and then pausing to feel gratitude for the learning they have forced us into.
I use to struggle mightily with this concept, the idea that I should be grateful for my husband leaving me, or the death of a family member through fentanyl poisoning, or… well, fill in the blank. It felt not only insane but downright masochistic. Why on earth would I feel grateful for having my life shattered? What is there to be grateful for?
The book that helped me understand this concept was Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (2016). She writes about how her spiritual journey began the day her husband told her he was having an affair and wanted a divorce:
“When anyone asks me how I got involved in Buddhism, I always say it was because I was so angry with my husband. The truth is that he saved my life. When that marriage fell apart, I tried hard—very, very hard—to go back to some kind of comfort, some kind of security, some kind of familiar resting place. Fortunately for me, I could never pull it off. Instinctively I knew that annihilation of my old dependent, clinging self was the only way to go.”
Now, I’m not saying we all need to stop everything and become Buddhists. That just happened to be where Chödrön’s journey led her. But her advice is good.
When we’re in these difficult moments, we feel like we’re drowning and it’s hard to come up for air. We’re scrambling to find our footing, not realizing that the ground is right under our feet if only we could calm ourselves enough to seek it. It is precisely those moments that force us back into the wave of life, to a place where things are not as concrete, as black and white as we thought. She continues:
“Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It’s a very tender, non-aggressive, open-ended state of affairs.”
Finding the lesson in the difficult moments in our life does not mean that we have to like them. Or that we wouldn’t give anything for them to not have happened. There is a part of me that will always want my marriage back. I would give anything for certain people to still be on this planet. I wish wholeheartedly that I could time travel back and stop certain things from happening.
But deep down I know those are fantasies, seductive fictions bereft of oxygen. I cannot live in them or I will die.
All I can do is to use these experiences to deepen my understanding of what it means to be human in this world. More specifically, these experiences have grown my understanding of what it means to be me in relation to this world.
You do not have to like or be grateful for your divorce, or the hurt that person inflicted on you, or the death of a loved one, etc. But you can be grateful for the learning and growth that came out of it.
So.
This Thanksgiving I invite you to take pause and give thanks for the lessons the difficult moments have taught you.
What did you learn about yourself that you would not have learned without the inciting incident?
How are you different? How are you the same?
Who did it bring you closer to?
Did it give you the push to set certain necessary boundaries?
What has changed about how you go about your daily life?
What beliefs did it force you to let go of?
As a way of giving thanks, and to help people prepare for what can be a difficult holiday season, I am offering $40 off the first five sessions for new clients. If you know anyone who is struggling with difficult events, send them this link!
References
Chödrön, Pema (2016). When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times. Shambhala Press.
