“Piglet noticed that although he had a Very Small Heart, it could hold a rather large amount of Gratitude.” –A.A. Milne. Sitting here in my dorm room, all grown-up in college, I never thought I would relate so closely to a Winnie the Pooh quote. Yet, here I am.
If you’re anything like me, you sometimes feel as if your capacity to handle all the things going on in your life is fairly weak. Figuring out big soul-issues like what to believe about life and love and God and death and the future, while also juggling hundreds of tasks for school, maintaining relationships, learning how to cope with stress and doing basic life stuff can make me feel as if my capacity for holding it all is shrinking by the second.
Piglet, I feel you.
My heart isn’t feeling so large at the moment. In fact, I just want to lay on my bed, watch "Friends," and forget the world. I want to forget my to-do list that is much too long for having just completed so-called ‘Syllabus Day’. I don’t want to wake up at 8 a.m. for my economics class and I don’t want to submit discussion board responses or read the first chapter in my textbook.
Once again, Piglet has a point. Gratitude isn’t something else to scribble into your to-do list. It doesn’t demand your time or energy or take up heart space. Gratitude is simply way of being that changes not the actions of your day-to-day, but the way you view and feel about those every day routines.
It’s like a magical wand that you wave over your life to reveal the brand new carriage where before you saw just an ordinary pumpkin. Love for the present moment, the beautiful happenings of now, takes over when you let gratitude into your life. It cultivates inner peace into your soul, because you aren’t worried about the future when you’re grateful for your now. With gratitude, seeds of hope spring up in your life; when you look around, you no longer see everything that you’re missing, you see only the beauty of everything you have.
As Eckhart Tolle, one of the most spiritually influential people in the world, says, “Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.” This isn’t a naïve spiel about turning a blind eye to your problems; it’s encouragement for you to open your eyes to what is truly going on in your life and finding something to be grateful for in all of it. No matter what it is, there is a lesson to be learned, a way to grow, something to experience, or a person to touch. Gratefulness is a recognition of those things, not a way of pretending your life is something that it isn’t.
One of the wonderful things about cultivating gratitude into your life is that it isn’t hard. Every night before bed, I write the things I noticed that I was grateful for throughout the day. Just phrases or words, no long sentences or paragraph descriptions of my feelings. Yesterday, my day was filled with deadlines, getting rental textbooks, going to my first classes, unpacking, cleaning, finishing laundry and printing syllabi, just to name a few things. My temptation was to moan and complain about everything I had to do, but here is my grateful list at the end of that night: “Grateful for: great timing; getting everything done; rental textbooks that I don’t have to pay full price for; my mom; this campus and seeing how much I’ve grown at this school; being able to live on campus; the way the sky looked on my drive home; the opportunity to attend school; my RA class; Jaime [my roommate].” Suddenly, my world turned from stressful to peaceful; my complaining into thankfulness. Getting my textbooks was not annoying, it was amazing, because it was free. Cleaning my dorm room was not exhausting; it was a reminder that I have the opportunity to live on campus and don’t have to commute anymore. Side note, my mom makes it into my grateful list just about every day.
Just the act of writing down what you’re grateful for each night brings an entirely new quality of awareness and presence in every moment. It sheds light on the beauty of the ordinary and the simple. So take Piglet’s advice and stop worrying about how large your capacity is to handle all the stress in life, and start growing a space in your life to be grateful. The beautiful thing is that you don't have to have much; you just have to be grateful for what is there. I promise you’ll find it makes all the difference.
