“Thank You For The More-Coming”… A Solution to the Pressure to “Be Grateful”
Our family, waiting for the more-coming last October
This week we will all be inundated with various forms of the question from well-meaning relatives, podcasts and blogs: What Are You Thankful For? I am all for gratitude in its many forms, and we now have scientific proof how beneficial it is for us to practice gratitude so, yes. Gratitude is good. BUT I do feel like there can be a pressure at times, especially this week of Thanksgiving, to be grateful and that pressure to be grateful can be incredibly shame-inducing. Because what if you don’t have all the things you WANT, but you are supposed to be thankful anyway?
This is a dilemma I think a lot of us working on ourselves come up against in many spheres - including those of the self-help, neo-spiritual and just plain old-fashioned religious/moralistic variety. Be thankful for what you have. Don’t focus on what you don’t have. So many people have less. Why can’t you be grateful for all that you do have?
I like being thankful, but what I like EVEN MORE than being thankful is thinking about what I’d like to have next. So I focus a lot on things I don’t have, what isn’t yet in my life, where I’m going and what I’d like to experience there. A LOT of people have tried to “help” (i.e. shame) me about this, and it’s only until recently that I’ve drummed up enough courage to like this about myself. I am a visionary, I am a futurist, I LIKE and CAN see far into the future of my life and - if given permission - others. I like to dream and see whats there and then I like to reverse engineer my life from those dreams so I end up where I want. I like achieving things, and then I like blowing those things up and achieving something else. I’m an artist. I want to create and destroy and then create again. I’m a big fan of the Goddess Kali. I like it intense and then more intense and change doesn’t really scare me that much. In short, I am built well for these times. Many MANY people who were totally well-meaning and loving have questioned this about me or pathologized this about me or tried to get me to do wonderful and lovely things that I don’t have any interest in: live in the present, practice gratitude what I have instead, think about what my past traumas have done to me to create this need. They have told me “This is really a quest for your mothers love” or “This is really about your discomfort with the present.” “BE HERE NOW. ” Thanks Ram Dass, but really I’d like to be here now, dreaming of the future.
I have come up with a solution to this challenge: wanting to practice gratitude while wanting so many many things I don’t yet have. While writing out in my journal today all the things in my life I am grateful for like a good girl who works on herself and is Thankful during Thanksgiving, I wrote down:
Thank You For The More-Coming. For the Opportunities to Grow and Learn and Become And Adventure.
I realized that what I am truly grateful for IS that there is so much more that I want. That I am alive and hungry for life - for more adventure and excitement and change. To see what else I can do with myself, what I can become, what I can grow into. As someone who LOVES to dream of the future, the greatest gift is to have all these wants and dreams and hopes still in me even in my (gasp, I’m writing it) middle-age. I am 40 and have a wife and kids and became a therapist and flower farmer (all dreams realized) and moved from a city way into a rural countryside with 16 chickens and what else now? What if I could have my own cow and milk it? What if I could publish a book? Go on tv? Start a podcast? Live off grid in a pioneer cabin? Start a spiritual pottery business in Santa Fe and wear long flowing colorful kaftans all day? These are just some of the many juicy dreams that are hanging out with me now. There are more and more, my friend. They just keep on coming.
If you are someone who wants a lot, like me, but also wants to be grateful I invite you to release yourself from any shame you feel for not being grateful for what you have and instead be grateful for your dreams.
In deepest gratitude for you, dear reader, who make my thoughts feel real because they are read,
Gretchen