A Little MS with a Little MSW

Two buzz concepts of the recent past that drive me absolutely nuts are: mindfulness and gratitude journals. I am okay with the premise of each. I really am. Staying focused on the present in order to squash one’s tendency to “live in the past” and/or worry about the future, is a noble plan. And yes – being mindful of all the things we have to be grateful for is probably a better focus of our efforts than dwelling on all the things we despise.

However.

I’m just gonna come out and say it, because somebody needs to: mindfulness is freaking exhausting! Maybe I struggle with it so much because my mind ‘slips’ a thousand times a day along the continuum of my life, but ain’t nobody got time to be constantly jerking their thoughts back to reality (ope there goes gravity). Any Eminem fans out there?

See? I can’t do it. I type a phrase that reminds me of an Eminem lyric and then my mind spirals to last year’s Super Bowl half time show, to how much I love that man, to the first time I heard a white rapper. Ice Ice Baby.

Quick – somebody grab me a gratitude journal – I am thankful for white rappers. The former, not the latter. Ha.

Rain does have a small speaking part in this blog, and here it is: As I was driving (and driving…) in the rain today, I began to think about the relationship between mindfulness and gratitude. I think it is difficult to embrace or express gratitude if one does not understand what it is to be present in the moment, or mindful. The very act of writing in a gratitude journal requires us to be mindful.

Sure, we can be grateful for a person or experience from our past, but that person or experience would have never graduated to a memory to be reflected upon with gratitude without us having been fully present, engaged, and mindful at some point in time. Here’s my main issue with gratitude journals: they are repetitive. If you have to remind yourself every single day that you are grateful for your friends, family, health, etc…how grateful are you, really? I also think it would get quite boring to finish the same sentence, day after day: “Today I am grateful for…”

I truly am not opposed to either concept. I encourage you all to go forth and be both mindful and grateful, I guess I am just surprised how both have turned into such incredible money-making industries as of late. I personally don’t think we humans are as lagging in gratitude as those mass-produced journals would have us to believe. Even in this technological, worldly age that has married the dichotomy of anonymity and connectedness, kindness and humanity is still all around us. Go out and look for those things today. And then go home and write about it in your gratitude journal.