[This article originally appeared in the November/December 2013 issue of Unity Magazine and is reprinted here with permission.]
How
a number two pencil became a magic wand that broke one spell and cast another
I had to do something. I had to change my
mind. I couldn’t keep trudging down the same tired road, stuck like water in a
channel it did not choose. I needed to dig a new channel. But I couldn’t find
the shovel.
Simply scolding myself to think
new thoughts didn’t help. Habitual conditioning doesn’t break that easily.
I needed to take action.
I began to keep a gratitude journal.
Every morning for a year I got up
and sat with my blank book and a pencil. I’d write, “I’m grateful for…” and
wait. Sometimes it took a while. But I always came up with something. Even if I
didn’t really feel it, I wrote it anyway. Action precedes internal
transformation.
I often wrote about the same
things – my wife, my work, my home. And sometimes fleeting moments crept in –
the color of the sky, a hovering hummingbird, the smell of French onion soup.
Some days it was easy. Some days
it was hard. But a certain tenacity, a stubborn doggedness took hold. I was not
going to screw this up. My ego was on the line. Hey, whatever it takes.
After a few weeks something began
to shift. I began to look forward to my morning writing. It was a chance to
testify, to tell the simple truth about the life I live, to proclaim and record
the evidence that life has infinite value and is fleshed out with a beauty that
takes your breath away. It is surprisingly not often that one gets to say true
things. It’s generally frowned upon in polite conversation. People look at you
like you’re drunk.
Then a few months later I began
to notice a subtler, deeper shift. The daily practice of writing concrete
examples of gratitude made me look at my experiences through different eyes. As
I went through my day I scanned the periphery like a predator for beauty,
grace, and the generosity of the world, you know, things to be grateful for.
Knowing that I had a writing assignment due in a few hours, I stayed vigilant,
eyes wide for bounty. And do you know what happens when you look for something?
You find it.
This is the secret power of the
gratitude journal. In the end, the journal doesn’t matter. It’s just the
leavings after the feast. It’s not the product, it’s the process that changes
you. The gratitude journal is simply a device, a shovel for digging a new
channel through which the restless mind can flow.
Before I began keeping a
gratitude journal I passed the hours in worry and fear, convinced that I had to
guard against the inevitable onslaughts of an uncaring world and navigate a sea
of vaguely dangerous human beings all working at cross purposes. It was
stressful. After keeping a gratitude journal for a year these old habits of
thought were reprogrammed. The scales fell from my eyes and I began to see the
world as a field of infinite possibility, a beneficent, nourishing, beautiful
home filled with creative people all working toward the good as best they
understood it.
I didn’t change the world. I
changed the way I saw the world.
And then the final, subtlest and
most important shift occurred. An insight arose from the marrow of my bones. In
the authority of my own experience I came to know something I had previously
only suspected, or read about second-hand in the world’s great spiritual
classics, like Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” I came to know that I was one
with the sacred source of all things, an integral member of an interconnected
web of being. I made peace with paradox and declared an everlasting armistice
with myself. My conflicted confusion gave way to confident serenity. My grimace
of anxiety gave way to a smile. I began to laugh more easily and cry more
deeply. The light returned to my eyes. I let go of the need to control, a need born
of the fear that there is never enough. I came home to myself, and found that
it was a pretty good place to live.
Who knew that a pencil and a
piece of paper could do all of that?
