Practice Community: The Nails on the Chalkboard List
The opposite of a gratitude list and why that might be helpful
I wrote this a few weeks ago when I needed patience and perspective.
It was oppressively hot here (well, everywhere) last week. When I left my folks in Central Missouri earlier in the week, it was forecast to be 105’ with a heat index nearing 120. Even here in the Upper Midwest we’ve approached triple digits and broken records. Being outside is hard. I have reached the point of the summer where my patience with the heat is waning. I don’t want to sweat. I don’t want any more BBQ or air conditioning.
I feel grouchy even saying all this, but I’m tired. My friend and fellow writer
writes in one of my favorite essays in her recent book Collisions of Earth and Sky:“In coaching we often discourage folks from focusing on what they don’t like, but sometimes I wonder if it can be cathartic to just say it. Just get it out rather than stewing. Set it on the table, not to feed on but to clear it away for something else. To douse anything inflammatory with a pitcher of cold water. then you can turn your focus to what make you clad to be alive and breathing. To that which makes you ache with love for the world.”
She reminds us that sometimes it’s as healing to purge the things we dislike, are angry about, or are generally weighed down with in order to make space for the healing. I read this and immediately brain-dumped everything I was annoying me in my journal. My heart felt liberated, as though I’d been given permission to complain for a short while. It was fun.
If I’m being honest, I really hate gratitude lists, practices, journals, etc. etc. When I hear or read the suggestion that gratitude is the antidote to suffering, I want to breathe fire. This is not to say I’m someone who does not regularly revel in gratefulness, who does not notate and feel blessed by the cool evening breeze or the darting hummingbirds or the sweetness of a nuzzle of affection from my otherwise standoffish dog or whatever other simple pleasure crosses my path. I revel in those spaces. But the suggestion that gratitude is the cure for the deep aches that come with the human condition often smacks of dismissiveness, toxic positivity, and spiritual bypassing.
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