Be Grateful Even When It’s Hard

I had the opportunity to reflect on gratitude, the day after Thanksgiving, as I lay in an emergency room waiting for part of my scalp to be reattached to my head, True gratitude isn’t always easy, and it’s sometimes not pretty, as you can see in the picture at the bottom of this post.

Over the years, I’ve become fond of describing my physical challenges as coming from “the disability that I was blessed with.” I know that can sound warped – how can a disability be a blessing – so let me explain. I believe that all of our life experiences shape who we are, and if we want to accept ourselves, it’s important to be thankful for everything, even the negative things, like nose-diving off a curb at the end of a nice dinner date with your wife.

Granted, it’s a lot easier to be thankful for the pleasant things in our lives, but that isn’t the complete picture, and the complete picture can sometimes take years to see. Fifty-plus years of stumbling around this planet have made the complete picture progressively clearer for me.

I can now see that my disability has given me an extraordinary life. Sure, there are times like last Friday, when I might prefer ordinary over extraordinary, but that choice isn’t available to me. The choice for me to make is how to make the most out of my circumstances, and if I am to do that, I have to be grateful for everything. I have to consider how a life of overcoming physical challenges has sharpened my creative business mind and allowed me to be more successful than I might have otherwise been. The break-up with an ex-girlfriend, an experience from which I thought I’d never recover, has made me a better husband with an enhanced appreciation for my wife. I can look at almost all of the low points and frustrations I’ve experienced in my life and see how I’ve grown from them, and thus, why I should be grateful for them.

A little more than five years ago, I was blessed to read “The Gift,” by Rhonda Byrne. The book is a sequel to her popular book, “The Secret.” The theme of The Gift is that appreciation shields us from negativity. When we’re truly appreciative, we’re impervious to negativity. That idea was easy to accept, but Byrne challenges readers to dig deeply for gratitude. Most have no problem being grateful for the obvious gifts in life, like our family, friends and health. It’s when we go layers deeper that we struggle.

In one section of the book, Byrne suggests that we think about each part of our bodies and be grateful for it. As you might imagine, that can be difficult when some parts of your body are problematic, like mine are. To follow Byrne’s suggestions, I had to be consciously grateful for weak legs, a bald head and a shoulder that does little more than cause pain. On the other hand, my life is better with these things than it would be if I didn’t have them, and I’ve trained my brain to remember this when I’m tempted to dip into negativity.

Thanksgiving might be behind us for another year, but I contend that we should always be grateful, even when it isn’t easy. It wasn’t easy to embrace gratitude in the ER, especially when they were popping staples into my head. A great day was ending in a rather messy situation. Still, I had my loving wife at my side, and it wasn’t like this mishap was ending my career as a GQ model. In fact, other than a scar and a story, the entire thing wasn’t going to slow me down.

I don’t know how this incident will propel me forward, but I have faith that it will, like almost every other challenge I’ve faced, and I’m grateful for that.