A Thousand Other Things

Mood Tools Week 12: Buoy Your Writing Mindset With Gratitude

The sky over Concord, NH on June 9, 2018 as printed on a small canvas I keep on a shelf in my office.

In Mood Tools Week 11, I wrote about the importance of taking the time to notice writing wins even when—maybe especially when—they’re small.

Week 12 is about the importance of feeling gratitude for your writing.

If you tend to feel more grumpy than grateful about your writing, that’s fine. Really. Mood Tools Week 4 was about the importance of feeling your emotions. All of them. So if you’re grumpy, out grump the grumpiest grump who ever grumped.¹ But when you’ve gotten that out of your system, maybe consider taking gratitude out for a spin.

Because it bears repeating, I want to say very clearly that by championing a gratitude practice, I’m not espousing toxic positivity—be angry, cry, marinate in your ambivalences—but I am absolutely saying that, whenever we can, we should nudge ourselves toward happiness. Given that gratitude is the best road to happiness I know, it stands to reason, then, that nurturing gratitude for our writing might also be the best road to writerly happiness.

For those wrestling with a particularly gnarly project—the topic is traumatic, the process has been harrowing, or you just got some tough love about a draft you thought was close to finished, say—gratitude may feel like an impossibly tall order, so start small.

Can you feel grateful that you’re working on a project that you care enough about to continue wrestling with it?

Can you feel grateful for that one beautiful turn of phrase you wrote this morning?

Can you feel grateful for where you are now as a writer compared to where you were last week or last month or last year? Go back as far as you need to feel grateful. Can you feel grateful about where you are now compared to where you were five years ago? Ten years? Twenty?

If feeling grateful about your own work is too big a stretch, can you maybe feel grateful for the work of others? The writer whose words first inspired you to write yourself? The writer whose work made you feel seen? The writer who penned that stunning sentence you loved so much you memorized it?

What about writers closer to you? Can you can feel grateful for the writing teachers who helped you improve or the writer friends who kept you company on your wondrous but sometimes lonely writerly journey?

If even being thankful for other writers is a reach, can you practice gratitude in your non-writing life? The simplest gratitude practice is to pay attention to those things you love that you most often take for granted.

Watermelon on Memorial day. Clouds lava-lamping across the sky. Your favorite pen. Your summer tea—mine’s raspberry. The soft comfort of well-worn shoes. The juke boxes we carry in our pockets. Laptops. Portable keyboards. Noise-canceling headphones. The tiny new leaves emerging from your houseplants right now—go look! The birds who perch outside your window while you’re making breakfast. The fact that you’ve got a breakfast to make at all. Your refrigerator. The miraculously speedy kettle that heats water to pour over that raspberry tea. That one impossibly soft blanket that’s light enough to cuddle under all the way through the summer. Popcorn. In-season salad vegetables. The delightful discovery that nutritional yeast can zhuzh up both popcorn and salads.

The friends who always lift you up. The friends who always makes you laugh. The friends you can talk with about anything. The trifecta husband who does all three. Dogs with kind eyes. Swarms of jellyfish lava-lamping safely behind aquarium glass, videos of crackling fires, trains, the smell of lake water. The intoxicating scent of peonies. The vibrant colors of tulips. The zombie-like tenacity of purple statice.

Water at the turn of a tap. Indoor plumbing. Ice cream. Swimming. Walking. Chocolate.² Breathing. Music that makes you laugh. Music that makes you dance. Music that makes your heart ache. Perfectly balanced scented candles. Electric candle lighters. Hot showers. The printing press. The existence of monkeys. Owls as a metaphor. Stars in the night sky. Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Novels that haunt you. Writing that moves you. Movies that feel like old friends. Hugs. Laughter. Kindness. Wit. Wonder. Card magic. Password managers³. And about a thousand other things I’ll remember the minute I publish this newsletter.

So.

How are you feeling after weathering my desultory⁴ list of the silly and profound things I’m grateful for during this particular ten-minute-stretch on this particular night? Your mileage may vary, of course, because what kind of weirdo blurts out jellyfish in a stream of consciousness exercise about the things she’s grateful for and then decides not to edit it out? Look, I’m not going to waste time pointing out the myriad merits of jellyfish⁵, but I will point out that somewhere in the middle of reading my giant list, some part of your brain started to add your own entries to the list, and maybe—just maybe—doing so made you felt a little buoyed.

That said, I’m nervous about talking about gratitude publicly at a time when the world is bleeding from more wounds than any one human can keep up with. How can we possibly practice gratitude at a time when war continues to rage in the Ukraine, pollution is killing our planet, and transgendered Americans are fighting for basic human rights?⁶ I suppose a case can be made for facing off against our broken world with emotional austerity, but what good does that do anyone? Refusing ourselves the joy of gratitude doesn’t heal our wounded world—it just adds our own emotional wounds to the already overwhelming mix.

Maybe the better question isn’t how can we feel gratitude given the state of the world but how can we not?

My father was obsessed with clouds. He was forever scanning the skies and pointing out formations he found especially moving. Rushing to the hospital in time to say goodbye to my father on the day he collapsed never to wake up, I snapped a dozen photos of the sky over a field about a mile from the hospital. Even as my father lay hooked to an impossible number of machines, the sky took my breath away. Taking a moment to feel grateful for the beauty of those clouds gave me a much needed moment of peace during the screaming panic of that morning, and that peace made me strong enough to translate the jargon-filled updates from the cardiologist to help my mom understand that the machines were keeping dad alive, and the most loving thing we could do for him was turn them off and bear witness as dad slipped away.

Did you see what just happened?

I sat down to write about gratitude and segued into despair and grief. By taking the time to practice gratitude, we allow ourselves to feel everything more fully which gives us the very real feeling that there’s profoundly more life in our lives.

That’s gratitude’s superpower, I think.

And if gratitude can enrich our full and beautiful lives, imagine what it can do for our writing.

How about you?

What are you most grateful for in your writing practice? Or in your life, if you’d rather. Periodically listing out all the things we love can be a powerful way to remind ourselves that there really is joy and wonder in this heartbreaker of a world.

So what brings you joy and wonder?

1. Currently a tie between Roy Kent and Oscar the Grouch, though I may have to throw the win to the muppet with the word grump in his name. Fair warning for spoilers about the Ted Lasso finale: I can’t watch it until Saturday, so if you ruin it for me, I will growl at you. Ferociously.

2. It’s perhaps the Cathy-est thing ever that I thought to be grateful for chocolate before I thought to be grateful for breathing.

3. What on earth did we ever do before password managers came into our lives? Growled at our computers like Roy Kent, that’s what.

4. I will be forever grateful to Simon and Garfunkel for teaching me this word.

5. Except to say if you don’t get it clearly you’ve never known the absolute peace of watching this video on repeat while recovering from abdominal surgery. Yes, there were pain meds involved, but the peace is Pavlovian. In the brief time this video has been playing after I went to find it to share with you here, my blood pressure dropped several points.

6. If you haven’t subscribed to Erin Reed’s Erin in the Morning, start with the sobering article on the wildfire of anti transgender legislature in these decidedly Un-united States.