“What am I tripping over?”
A Gratitude Message by Lisa Solis DeLong RN
As the holiday of Thanksgiving approaches, I am reminded of a moment in time when I did not feel thankful for anything. A time when the “Gratitude is an attitude” cliché was downright maddening. It was a time much like the ones we are experiencing now, where it seemed like the whole world is in chaos. If you are feeling that way now, I am here to say, I feel you. Trust me, it is possible to sense gratitude even when we are in a state of suffering.
I learned the practice of gratitude the hard way. You see, after my fifteen-year-old son succumbed to leukemia, grief became my teacher. Adjusting to life without my son’s physical presence has afforded me many lessons like learning to trust my intuition, rebuilding my beliefs, and feeling gratitude for the mundane and the uncomfortable.
One night after coming home from a late night of ballroom dancing, I entered our dark living room and tripped over my surviving son’s sneakers. Jacob was fourteen and wearing man size shoes. Nearly falling on my face, feeling the ache in my exposed toe, I angrily picked up the shoes and stormed down the hallway toward his room. I opened the door, cocked my throwing arm back, shoes in hand ready to launch and found him sleeping.
And then it happened, grief lesson number one thousand one hundred and fifty-three and counting. Jacob, who also had experienced leukemia as a little boy had nearly died too. In bed, he looked like Justin, when he had been a vibrant fifteen-year-old young man. The testosterone a heavy scent of Jacob’s room, the breathing, calm and soothing. The sounds of sleep, soft exhales and inhales, almost snores but not quite, peaked my memories. I paused, shoes in hand and stood in my son’s doorway taking in the scene. It was then that it struck me, ‘When was the last time I saw a teenage boy sound asleep? When was the last time I tripped over a pair of shoes this size? How lucky am I to have this kid in my house leaving his shoes laying around so I can trip over them in the dark?’
The attitude of gratitude met me at that door. Jacob slowly rolled over and let out a long sleepy exhale. As I watched him breathe, I was filled with great gratitude. Simply noticing his breath brought me peace. As a nurse and a mother, I knew what last breath looked like, felt like, sounded like. Tears flowed, pain subsided, anger diffused. I gently tossed the shoes on the floor next to his bed. In that moment, the feeling of gratitude washed away the feeling of grief, and out came tears of joy.
Gratitude guru, Jon Kabat-Zinn says, “Remember the bad, be grateful in your current state, it is helpful to remember the hard times that you once experienced. When you remember how difficult life used to be and how far you have come, you set up an explicit contrast in your mind, and this contrast is fertile ground for gratefulness.”
It is possible for the struggle to end when gratitude begins, when we uphold the good things, we are planting seeds of appreciation. Begin your gratitude practice today by asking yourself, “What am I tripping over?” To answer that question, meditate on your relationships with parents, friends, siblings, work associates, children, and partners and then go deeper with three more questions: “What have I received from ________?”, “What have I given to ________?”, and “What troubles and difficulty have I caused?”
When we acknowledge the role we play in each other’s lives, we begin to see how people contribute in providing our lives with the good things in life, we begin to grow a gratitude practice simply by becoming self-aware. In so doing, we throw our greatest power into creation because the greatest catalyst of creation is gratitude.
