Looking on the Bright Side
It’s easy to be grateful when the sun’s out and your rose-colored glasses are not askew, but there are gloomier days when finding something to be thankful for becomes an almost impossible chore, especially when someone tells you that you should. How can you be thankful for anything when you’re lonely or heartbroken or hurting? When someone tells you to be grateful for small favors, even if they are only trying to help, it can feel as if they are not really listening to your problem.
Let’s say a tree has just fallen on your house. The last thing you want is for some well-intentioned but zealous Pollyanna to point out that at least you still have a garage. Polly, it appears to you, has entirely missed the point—that your house is done. Kaput. Finito. It has ceased to be a house and is instead a pile of scrap with your stuff mixed in. What’s to be happy about in that? True, maybe no one was hurt. Perhaps you’ve been meaning to remodel and you always hated that tree, anyway. But it’s now raining on what is left of your living room. Surely you’re entitled to your misery?
Absolutely. Feeling upset is a rational response to a bad situation. Expressing those emotions and then having a really good cry afterward is very cathartic, and can leave you open to other ways of handling what has happened. Gratitude is one such mechanism. Being grateful for what has gone right, even if it’s only a very small thing, is one way to cope with what has gone wrong. It doesn’t invalidate your pain, frustration or grief to say, “Things could have been worse.” It’s a means of enduring those things.
On those days that good luck seems a myth, perhaps what we can be most thankful for is simple human resilience. We change, we adapt, we keep going. We may stamp our feet, swear a bit and have to wipe our eyes and blow our noses, but we get up the next morning and carry on.
Image by Bernat Casero
Tori is a student intern who will be working with the Thankfulfor team over the summer. She is a senior at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where she is studying graphic design.
