On the old road up Mill Mountain, part of Roanoke’s fabulous greenway system, there’s a small slab of concrete and brick on the edge of the blacktop. It’s about halfway up the mountain. I guess it’s a repair made to the roadbed a good while back. Anyway, it happens to be situated at a lovely part of the mountain.
My friend Bill has labeled this unassuming spot his “gratitude perch.” On his almost daily walks up that road, he pauses there and sits on the dented guardrail. He takes in the peacefulness and beauty of the mountain, a peace and serenity found there in any season. He ponders and considers. He thinks particularly about what he’s grateful for, and Bill explains that he could probably stay there all day doing just that. Being practical, he usually pauses there just long enough for the feeling of how fortunate he really is to bubble up fresh to the surface again.
Gratitude can be hard to come by. We wail that life isn’t fair! when things don’t go exactly our way. Sometimes I think, however, that if we look closer at the real scale of fairness, we find that we have been dished out in a lopsided way, far more goodness than bad. Heaps more than we can ever “deserve.”
It seems that in life, there are always things to be upset about; there are always things one can “legitimately” complain about. And complain we do. I guess there’s a certain amount of that tendency inside us all, but doing so distracts from the joy of the here and now. What good is that? If we wholeheartedly dig for reasons to be thankful, I think we can effectively counteract a lot of the “blah” parts of life.
Occasionally, I somehow tweak my backor injure some other part of my body, and it will remain sore for a few days or a week. Ugg. Of course, just before hurting it, I’m moving merrily along with absolutely no thought of how wonderful my back is functioning. Nope, no thought at all. But when I’m sore, it garners quite a lot of my attention. I refer to such a time of temporary back pain as Back Appreciation Days, ‘cause when my body hurts is when I most appreciate when it doesn’t hurt.
There’s another gratitude game I’ve earnestly played. During long-distance running races, I would recite, both in my mind and aloud, what I’m thankful for in endless monologues to myself. It served as a way to endure the discomfort; to put a positive spin on things.
To help keep things in perspective.
I’m a cancer survivor, and that status, probably more than anything else, has helped me keep my sense of gratitude from becoming too dusty, rusty, or otherwise neglected.
If we regularly maneuver ourselves into a state of thankfulness, reminding ourselves of some of the things that act like beautiful shafts of light in each of our lives, perhaps it will, as my friend Eric says, “do you good and help you too.”
Have troubles? With a laugh, my friend Rocky roughly reminds me, “Be grateful it’s not any worse because brother, it most assuredly could be!”
“But practicing gratitude gets in the way of our lovely and God-given right to endlessly complain,” sarcastically cries another friend. Hmm, I can’t argue with that one.
A feeling of entitlement sure does suppress gratitude. We see it in the spoiled childand adult. They have somehow gotten the feeling that they fully deserve all the exceptional treatment, the grace, coming their way; it is therefore absolutely nothing special at all. Oh my, what a shame. I feel sorry for such people, and I’m not sure what can be done about such an affliction. Practice gratitude and know –really know — how fortunate you are.
Taking things for granted is when we forget just how lucky we are in some respect or another. I do this all the time, and it seems to come naturally. I fight it, though; I know if I don’t, I might miss some special and wonderful loveliness in this life, just breeze right through it.
During the time I was working on this little essay, I fell and broke a bone in my hand, my dominant hand, of course. I have a cast on it just now as I awkwardly write. It’s a bit of a nuisance, but if I’m lucky, the hand will heal up fine — in an excruciating six weeks, haha — and all I’ll have lingering from the experience will be an enhanced appreciation for fully operational hands.
I love the concept of the Gratitude Perch. I admire the idea of regularly exercising the discipline of thankfulness in a particular setting. A place to pause and reflect. Sure, one can and probably should practice gratitude any old where, but linking it to a place of calm and beauty, a locale one returns to often, is genius, I think. Whenever I come upon the Gratitude Perch on my frequent wanders on Mill Mountain, I chuckle at the thought of Bill sitting there counting his blessings. And I can’t help but stop and do the same.
Ultimately, I guess practicing gratitude better enables us to appreciate the good things, the “blessings” we have here and now, while we still have them. Whatever they may be. Some semblance of good health, perhaps, family, close friends, being gainfully employed, andretirement.
A place like the gratitude perch helps me remember to be thankful.
