A Ridiculously Huge Grin

Gratitude.

This one word has been on repeat in my head lately. I also can’t tell you how many times I’ve said to myself or others I’m just so grateful during the past few weeks. And knowing that this year hasn’t exactly been a banner year for everyone, I even feel grateful to not take my gratitude for granted.

For years now, I’ve always tried to carry with me an attitude of patience, positivity, and gratitude. Some days it’s harder to do this than other days, but lately I haven’t had many of those days where you need to remind yourself to look for the good in them. There’s just been a lot of good.

On the inside these days, I’ve been constantly jumping up and down, yelling about how awesome everything is. But on the outside, I’ve found myself proceeding with caution when I’m about to express gratitude in conversation. While I don’t want to downplay how grateful I feel, I do want to be considerate that not everyone is having a great time right now.

When it feels right, I let that bouncy excitement flow out of me in my interactions with others. But, if it feels better to be more subdued in the moment, I keep my feet firmly on the floor. There is definitely a balance between expressing your gratitude for the good things in your life and causing someone to feel like you are rubbing salt in their wounds. And I’m not willing to have my gratitude be at the expense of other people. Just like I’m not willing to let someone else’s bad mood drag me out of my good one.

I believe you find what you are looking for in life. If you are constantly looking for the bad, you’ll find it. And if you look for the good things, you’ll find them too. We all go through challenges, and we don’t get to control what happens in our lives. But we do control our perspectives. Personally, I like life better when I look for the good things and remember to be grateful.

These past few weeks, I’ve been incredibly grateful almost all day, everyday. For the first 8 months of this year, I felt like I was putting my head down and grinding through work. The very slow process kind of work where mostly, nothing seems to happen. There was plenty of good, but there was also a lot of drudging through. I was constantly reminding myself to be patient, acknowledge the progress, and look for the positives.

Then suddenly around the beginning of September, everything started to shift. Life felt like it was balancing on the edge, like something was about to happen. So I put my head back down and kept pushing through the work in front of me. Before I knew it, all those things I’ve been incredibly grateful for lately started falling into place. And every day since that first tilt of motion, my face has been plastered with a ridiculously huge grin.

I’m grinning because there are a lot of good people in this world and I feel incredibly lucky to have so many great people in my life. They’re the kind of people that don’t hesitate celebrating your good things with you, even when [actually, especially when] there is nothing in it for them. And I’m grateful to feel progress towards these big goals I have. For a while there, it felt like trying to run through quicksand.

What I’ve learned these past few weeks is that patience, positivity, and gratitude are superpowers. The more you carry them with you in life, the more you feel them. And the more genuine gratitude you feel for the people and things in your life, the more beautiful every single day feels. At least that’s what I believe anyway.