Tag: gratitude

Painting the Harbour Bridge and Other Never-Ending Chores

https://www.pexels.com/photo/sydney-harbour-bridge-4023897/

There is a myth that the Harbour Bridge is continually painted without a break. The story goes that when painters finish at one end, they go back and start at the beginning. This is an urban myth. The reality is that sections need to be painted at differing intervals. Still the myth persists.

Cleaning my house feels like the story about painting the harbour bridge. No sooner do I finish one task, the next is already waiting for me. Now I don’t know whether the painters enjoy their job, but I certainly don’t enjoy mine. I’d much rather be at my desk writing, reading a good book or taking the dog for a walk. Vacuuming, not so much.

Yesterday I vacuumed, did the washing, folded the clothes and put them away, packed and unpacked the dishwasher, changed the sheets and put the rubbish out. Today I will clean the bathroom, iron some work gear, tidy up yet again and water the plants. There’s much more on the list, but I know I won’t get to it. Already the floor looks like it could do with another going over.

Tomorrow the working week begins. When I get home, I will cook, tidy the kitchen, do the dishes and clean out the kitty litter. There won’t be time for much more. The rest of the week will follow in the same vein and then will come the weekend when the big clean will happen once more. Whoever came up with the phrase ‘rinse and repeat’ is a genius. It applies to so much of our daily lives.

Yet while I grumble about my daily chores, I also remember my mother’s lot. When I was a child, she washed clothes in a wooden tub using soap and a washboard to scrub them clean. It was backbreaking work. We didn’t have a vacuum, so cleaning the floor was a matter of a daily sweep with a broom and weekly mopping. Our dishes were washed in a plastic tub and dried with a tea-towel. There were no modern appliances in our house. Cleaning was drudgery.

I have to remind myself that I have it so much easier now. It takes me less than three hours to clean my house top to bottom, which is no more than 2% of all the time available in a week. Viewed in this way, it is hardly an imposition. As with so much of life, it is the attitude to the task that makes the difference. And so, the Bridge gets painted, my house gets cleaned, and I am blessed that life keeps moving on.

Weekends: The Gift of Time Well-Spent

I’m back at work after two glorious months off. While I was still working diligently on my own projects, the days and weeks had a different rhythm. Often, it was difficult to tell which day was which, as the weeks rolled into each other. There’s a deliciousness about feeling that we are outside of time, but it also has its downsides. Like forgetting about business hours for example and realising that others work on a different set of assumptions about working hours.

Now that I am back in the Monday to Friday world of work, weekends have a special quality to them. I can sleep in, read a book, go to the market and walk my dog at a more leisurely pace than during the week. This morning, I took my dog Zoë to the local café, wrote in my journal, drank my latté and shared a freshly baked croissant with her. Bliss.

Walking back, I took my time and noticed the small things that go unnoticed when on a deadline. Like the slight breeze that caressed my bare arms ever so gently. Entering a copse of trees, I saw the shadow of the leaves dancing on the path beneath my feet. I stopped to watch this shimmer of shadow and light – a performance dedicated to the spectator who chose to notice its exquisite beauty.

Back home I performed all the mundane duties that accumulated during the week. I didn’t grumble or delay, I completed them with a sense of joy that comes from being truly present to miracle of life and all it has to offer. Or as Eckhart Tolle put it,’Always say ‘yes’ to the present moment… Surrender to what is.’

A bubbly legacy

For 20 years, I didn’t drink a drop. Then, out for dinner with a man who would grace my life for four short years, I succumbed to a glass of red. It was delicious. Tart, intense and astringent, I enjoyed every mouthful.

I have never been a heavy drinker. Admittedly, I went through episodes of binge drinking in my early twenties, but that was mainly to overcome social anxiety. Once inebriated, I took advantage of my impaired control and began to enjoy parties, rather than be the wallflower hanging out in the kitchen counting tiles. But that was a long time ago.

When I began to drink again, I would only do so at dinner and never at every dinner. Then Roger introduced me to the glass of champers on a Friday evening to celebrate the passing of another week. His philosophy was simple – celebrate if you have had a good week and celebrate if you made it through a tough one. Either way, you are a winner.

When he ‘shuffled off this mortal coil’, as he liked to quote, I was left with an unusually large glass vase filled to the brim with champagne corks. It was years’ worth of good and not so good weeks he had lived through, with and without me. I neither wanted to keep them, nor throw them away. In the end, I reached a compromise, took a photo of the full vase and kept perhaps 30 of the corks. They remind me of a life well-lived.

Now I carry on the tradition, at least most weeks. I can’t drink a bottle of bubbly on my own, but I can enjoy a piccolo, which is 200mL or almost two standard glasses. It is a perfect amount. I raise my glass and salute Roger, and the passing of another week. Cheers!

Radical Gratefulness

Gratitude has become trendy with the positive psychology movement. You can always find something to be grateful for – be grateful for your breath, a pretty flower, a kind word. While I agree with the sentiment, I wonder whether the next generation who hear this mantra will grow up like I did, having to eat everything on my plate because I had to think of all those starving children in India. I am quite sure none of my Indian friends ever benefitted from the extra mouthful of cauliflower or cabbage I forced down my throat and it created a very skewed relationship with food for me which has lasted a lifetime. Waste not, want not…

Don’t get me wrong, gratefulness is a beautiful state and I do believe that we need embody it much more than we do. My gripe is the glib statements that often sound forced and obvious.  What I have been grappling with is what we do when things go wrong in our lives. How to be grateful when truly terrible things happen. This is what mean by radical gratefulness.

When I watched Peter die, struggling to take his last breaths, in those moments, I felt grateful. Not for the intense sunny morning that seemed so incongruous with what was happening, nor for the 20 or so years I had spent with him, but for those awful moments where I watched him suffer and that I could be there to share them with him. As my dear friend Janet said at her husband’s funeral, ‘Today is a beautiful, terrible day.’

Ten years later, I sat with Roger as he took his last breath and once more, I was grateful to have had the honour to sit with him in that beautiful, terrible moment. To bear witness to someone’s final moments is to be filled with deep sorrow, pain and beatitude. Radical gratefulness is the only way I can describe this. It is the experience of two opposing feelings in visceral communion through grace.

And so it was this week when I experienced a major setback. It was my fault – I missed a crucial date, and it has cost me dearly. My first reaction was to be annoyed, frustrated, and to be honest, gutted. But as time went on, I was able to find my way back to radical gratefulness. I didn’t accept the ‘it happened for a reason,’ ‘something better will come your way,’ comments, although I truly appreciated the love and empathy I received. No, I forced myself to look at the situation deeply, accept it fully, and be grateful for the lesson I have learned about my chronic inattention to detail. It simply matters, and I’ve stopped making excuses about being ‘the big picture thinker’.

I can now say with conviction that I am grateful for the mistakes I’ve made, for they have enabled me to learn and grow. As Alex Elle explains eloquently, ‘Gratitude practice isn’t about pacifying our painful or challenging times —i t’s about recognizing them and finding self-compassion as we do the work.’

A reflective practice

Are still looking for a way to put 2022 behind you and stay positive about what this year could be like? I have a great practice for you that won’t take up much time and bring you some clarity about what is important for you to do in 2023.

  • Take a piece of paper and rule a line down the centre, as above.
  • Put a plus sign on one side and a minus on the other.
  • List all the great things that happened last year on the plus side.
  • List all the not-so-great things on the other.
  • When you finish, peruse your list, and look for themes.
  • List these.

You should gain some clarity on what has been important to you – family, friends, bushwalking – whatever floats your boat.

Aim to have more of these in your life this year and less of the things that don’t bring you satisfaction.

Now, ask yourself, what did 2022 teach you?

Here is what I found out through this practice:

  • I have a strong need for connection.
  • My animals bring me more joy than I realise.
  • When I have forced myself out of my comfort zone the sky didn’t fall in.
  • Writing plays a central part in my life.
  • Grief has accompanied me for a very long time.
  • I am in a state of ‘divine discontent’, which will no doubt push me forward to do more of what I want from life.

What I learnt last year:

  • Small steps daily lead to success faster than the occasional burst of action.
  • Kindness matters more than we realise as does gratitude.
  • I can be imperfect and still have successes.

Thanks to the London Writers’ Salon for this great idea.

Gratefulness

Portrait of Saint Dominic (Meister Eckhart), 1515. Fine Art Images / Getty Images

“If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough.”
― Meister Eckhart

Walk into any newsagent and you are likely to find a ‘Gratefulness Journal’, to record what you are grateful for each day. This might be feeling thankful for the important relationships in your life or the small, often overlooked, details such as noticing a bee land on a flower. It is a centering practice to help us focus on the beauty of life rather than fixate on our tribulations.

While it may look as if this is a fad which has come to us from the positive psychology movement, there is a far longer and much deeper history to consider. Gratefulness has been a religious practice for eons and not just in the Christian faith. It is present in Buddhism, in Judaism and Islam.

While it is easy to be grateful for the wonderful things we come across in life, it requires a much deeper practice to be grateful for our trials. When tragedy strikes or when things simply don’t go our way, it is difficult to see what to be grateful for. How can you be grateful for the death of a loved one or bushfires burning out of control? These are questions which have plagued humanity from time immemorial.

This is where I turn to people like Viktor Frankl and Etty Hillesum who have gone through the most horrific ordeals and could still be thankful for the small joys in their life. Viktor Frankl survived Hitler’s concentration camps, but Etty Hillesum didn’t.

My lived experience has been so much easier than theirs, but I too have had my share of grief and sorrow, as no doubt you have too. I look to Viktor and Etty and to people such as Brother David Steindl-Rast for spiritual guidance. I admire their resilience and depth of practice in difficult times. If Etty could be grateful for the beauty of life whilst in a concentration camp, I can be grateful for the small irritations that assail me daily.

This morning, late for work, I found I had a flat tyre. My first instinct was to curse and be annoyed. I drove to the local mechanic who kindly pumped it up so I could get to the next town where there was a tyre shop. Once there, I couldn’t be helped until much later in the day but I had to get to work. I took my chances and drove the 100km on what I thought was a dodgy tyre. I then left my car at a tyre shop expecting to get a whopping bill that I couldn’t afford. Instead, I was told that the problem was simply a valve, and it had been fixed when it was inflated by the mechanic. No charge.

Looking back, was I feeling stressed this morning? Of course I was! Did I get to work late? Yes! Was I grateful for all the people who helped me? Absolutely! I wanted nothing more but to say a heartfelt thank you to my colleague who was willing to cover for me, to the mechanic in my village who pumped up the tyre, to the salespeople in Cowra who wouldn’t charge me for their inspection. From what I perceived to be a miserable start to my day, I can only look back with gratitude to friends and strangers who have helped me along the way.

I strive to be thankful for each day and for whatever it may bring. I am grateful for my existence, that chance event that has bought me into this world. I know my life is but a brief flicker in the expanse of time and I am ever so grateful to have been given the opportunity to shine for that briefest moment that is mine.

https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/hillesum-etty

https://history.howstuffworks.com/historical-figures/viktor-frankl.htm

https://gratefulness.org/