Gratitude is healthy

One of my best friends, Yael Flusberg, recently posted some potent wisdom about gratitude on her blog.  She writes about her daily practice of making a list of things for which she is grateful.  And, as she notes, not in a cheesy way.  Even the messy stuff:

“I did not curse out so-and-so when she suggested I do XYZ, although internally I wanted to go ballistic on her.”


Yael is also an amazing poet, as you will discover when you read her post.


She inspired me to make my own list this morning:

12/7/10 9:29 AM

·      I am grateful for:

• ·      Coffee, even when it’s not the best coffee
• ·      A warm butane heater on a cold Barcelona morning
• ·      Desiree and Axel, who have become my friends during the two weeks they’ve opened their home to us.  For the funny videos we've made, and all the laughter we've shared.
• ·      Having sufficient traction and stability to totter and then right myself when stressful situations arise.  As opposed to falling over and getting sucked under for days.
• ·      Finding a studio to rent yesterday.  It has a big window, a wood floor, and open space with lots of other artists in the building, but not on top of me.  It’s in a fun neighborhood, not too hard to get to from our (hopefully) new house. And it’s cheap, by Barcelona standards.  I have a place to work!!!
• ·      Yael, who makes a daily gratitude list and who intervened helpfully in a stupid, repetitive Hirst family pattern (in which I am also a guilty party)
•    And if I'm going to be honest, I'm also grateful that, with the ongoing email help of my psychiatrist, I've been able to achieve a modicum of psycho-chemical balance in my brain.  I know all the subtle and dramatic signs that I'm doing better - 
•    that I am even capable of being somewhat social, 
•    that I'm sufficiently relaxed to let the lighter parts of me show. 
•      That I am sleeping OK most of the time.  
•    That I'm thinking about living, not dying.  
•    That I feel confident enough to start making plans, and 
•        that I'm stable enough to follow through on most of them.  
•     That I can be more gentle with myself when I still can't        do or be everything I wish for. 
•         
•        I don't give all the credit to the pills, but without them I lack the traction to do the work.  I may hate this fact, pero es lo que hay - that's how it is.
• 
  

   Thank you Yael, for this exercise.  It sounds so obvious, but it made me realize how much time I spend focussing on the negative.  And how much energy I get from at least acknowledging the positive.

what my dog Benedicto is grateful for... illustration by Raquel