Practicing Gratitude At The End Of the World

Things are bad.

At least, that's how it seems. The entertainment business appears to be shrinking into its shell, presenting a tougher exterior than ever for newcomers to penetrate. The country feels locked in one political quagmire after another with no end in sight, and the world at large suffers from wars and the devastating effects of climate change.

This creeping, pervasive feeling in the collective consciousness of a general negativity is shared by megaphone-wielding heralds of the apocalypse and the glass half full optimists. I offer no solution. I don't pretend to have some rare insight into how to save the world. All I can do is cast my gaze inward on my life experiences and see if I can write some words that might be helpful, even if to only one person. It's perhaps not the most potent weapon against the rising shitstorm that's coming at us from all sides, but it's the one I know how to wield.

An aphorism that I find myself thinking about often is "we can't control what happens to us, but we can control how we respond". While I fully appreciate that giving the advice to practice gratitude when the state of things seems so bleak for so many is akin to telling a depressed person to "just think happy thoughts," I do believe that the ritual of practicing gratitude can, over time, build a mental and emotional forcefield around us that inoculates us against the most insidious pits of despair and intrusive thoughts.

Let me step back for a minute and into more familiar territory of how this applies to the writer's life. I've written before about how cynicism kills creativity. The thesis of that post was more or less "Change your mindset about success and it will come easier." Well, here I am preaching another mindset shift, this time from one of fight-or-flight alarm to one of grounded appreciation. Why? Because at least practicing gratitude feels like we're doing something. At least it's a choice we can make. Even when we are tired of trying to get published, or arguing politics with family, or sharing another video about some atrocity happening somewhere in the world, we can still take up the banner of practicing gratitude. It’s a battle we can always fight because it happens in our minds and our hearts.

As a writer, try not to lament your lack of progress, but celebrate how far you've come. Go back and read the first thing you ever wrote. When you're done vomiting at the banality of it, smile at how much your skills have improved. If you're down about the state of the world, remember everything that's going great in your home and community (but don't stop trying to change what's not so great).

Practicing gratitude doesn't mean we bury our heads in the sand and ignore everything that isn't sunshine and rainbows. It's merely a tool we can keep with us, so that when the world feels (as it so often does) like an unstoppable vortex of bad, we can pull a little bit of sunshine from our pocket and use it to light the path before us.