Gravitating Toward Gratitude

There is a gravitational pull… 

We get at this pull with questions like:

Are you an optimist or a pessimist, a realist or idealist?

Are you a glass-is-half-empty or a glass-is-half-full kind of person?

To be honest, I always just considered myself to be appropriately balanced, a unique exception to the rule, someone who can be optimistic or pessimistic depending upon what the situation warrants.  It’s always preferable to be in the middle.  But who am I kidding?  The truth is that I am not balanced at all.  I tend to, even on my best days, gravitate toward the negative, toward the half-empty glass, toward the realist.  And I am not alone.  There is a gravitational pull toward the half-empty side for most of us.

The world we live in actually encourages us to bend in this direction.  Consider the impact of technology as just one example.  When I was a kid, we had one phone in the house.  And it wasn’t cordless.  It had a really long cord that got all knotted up.  And there was no privacy.  The phone was located in the kitchen.  When I was a kid, we had one TV in our house.  It had two knobs on the front, one for channels and one for volume.  If you wanted to adjust either, you had to get up off the couch and do so manually.  We didn’t have a remote control.  Technology has significantly enhanced our lives in many respects.  We can now change channels from the couch.  We can now use our phone to check email, pay bills, go shopping, search the internet, connect with friends, and watch movies.  And we can do all this stuff (and much more) from anywhere!  We don’t have to be standing in the kitchen.  We can literally fly across the country at 30,000 feet in a single afternoon!  Isn’t that wild?!? 

But we now take all that stuff for granted.  The result of technology is a collective attitude of entitlement and instant gratification.  We are so used to having everything right away.  So much so, in fact, that we get irrationally upset when something doesn’t go our way.  The smallest inconvenience can produce a total meltdown.  Like the other day when my email wasn’t working for a few hours, I nearly had a heart attack.  Seriously, I started to sweat and it was all I could think about.  I was irrationally upset at Google for the rest of the day.  Still don’t believe me?  Watch how people freak out when they discover their flight has been delayed!  This happened to me about six months ago.  My initial reaction?  I threw a tantrum and acted like the world was coming to an end.

We live in a world of instant gratification.  There is an attitude of entitlement.

We expect things to go our way, to always favor our agenda.  And when they don’t—and they quite frequently don’t—we tend to go to the dark side, that half-empty side of the glass.    

The way I’ve noticed this tendency most in my own life is what I choose to talk about at the end of the day.  I started to notice that when I got home from work, after playing with the kids, when Josie and I would sit down and talk about life, I would gravitate toward the problems and unresolved issues that surfaced throughout my day. 

So and so made a hurtful comment toward me.  You want to hear what they said?  Can you believe the nerve!?!  I just wanted to poke them in the eye…in the name of Jesus, of course… 

So and so was so annoying today.  Let me tell you what they did today… 

The project I wanted to complete today didn’t get finished.  I just keep hitting roadblock after roadblock.  I am so irritated.  Let me vent about it…for the next three hours… 

I am not sure what to do about…

It’s so easy to become jaded, to gravitate toward what is frustrating, irritating or unresolved.

About six months ago I was having lunch with a friend.  He was sharing with me that he has the same problem.  Like me, at the end of the day, even if a bunch of great stuff happened, he typically fixates on the stuff that didn’t go well.  To push back against this tendency, he put a white board up at his office and he now requires every single one of his employees to write down a highlight from their workday before they leave the office.  The idea is that he wants everyone leaving on a positive note.  It’s also a way for staff to know what’s going on in each other’s lives.  Win, win. 

Since that lunch, two very simple practices are helping me gravitate toward gratitude in my life.

1).  I now keep a gratitude log. 

Before the end of each day, I write down a couple of highlights.  Typically, these include things like, “An amazing run this morning.  Absolutely stunning sunrise!” or “Had fun playing with the boys tonight.  We laughed until we peed our pants.”  It doesn’t have to be deep.  It just has to be positive and encourage me to gravitate in the right direction.  I try to find something positive for both home-life and work-life.  I now have over 6 months of highlights for each day and it’s helping me tremendously.  It’s helping me pay attention to the good that’s been right in front of me all along.  It’s helping expand my understanding of how good God is.  It’s helping me gravitate more consistently toward the positive.    

2).  We now have a gratitude board at work. 

Yep, we flat out stole the idea.  But here is what I am learning.  Who we surround ourselves with affects us deeply, more that we even realize.  If you are around people that gravitate toward the negative, the pull on you will be stronger.  If you are around people that gravitate toward the positive, the pull in that direction will be stronger.  Our staff wants to be a group that individually and collectively is gravitating toward gratitude.  We want to be rooted in gratitude. 

Every good and perfect gift comes from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows – James 1:17