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Regarding Gratitude

I had a really interesting conversation this morning, and it's much too long to tweet about, so here are my thoughts.

When you write things, people read them, and that's fine. Yesterday's post would be a draft like a million others if I didn't guess that somewhere, someone else was having a minor existential crisis like me. And when people read things, they have opinions.

This is not about trolls or haters.

It's about a grown-up conversation, in real life, between two people who respect each other, but see things differently. Shockingly, people can still do that.

So, Colleague read what I wrote and asked me why I was so ungrateful. Reptile Sarah was getting ready to throat-punch someone, but Intelligent Human Sarah asked her to tell me more. (aside: "Tell me more." is the most magical phrase in or out of the classroom. Try it. You'll see.) She said, "You have so many things to be grateful for: a beautiful family, a job, so many talents. People have so little. Why are you complaining?"

My reply was this:

I am extraordinarily grateful for the things I have. I'm the luckiest person I can imagine. But here's the thing: being grateful doesn't mean that I can't acknowledge the suck. Things get crappy. Even things that I'm grateful for get crappy. But if I turn away from things that are uncomfortable, nothing ever changes. I don't get to make things better for others if I'm wallowing in how great I have it. Life is good and awful all at the same time, and I'm grateful for that.
She was pretty shocked by that, honestly. She's no Pollyanna, but she's a bit sunshinier than me in general. I busted out a quote at her, you know the one about keeping your face to the sunshine and you can't see the shadow? (Which is always attributed to Helen Keller and I think that's odd, but that's just me being sightist or something, probably.)

And I told her that it's the sun that makes the shadows.

So ignoring them means you're ignoring part of what makes the sun so beautiful. So powerful.

She'd never thought of it that way.

Have you?

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