Feeling like you’ve got this whole life thing figured out? Yeah, me neither. In this episode . . . lessons learned from trying to live a more appreciative life and screwing it up over and over again. It’s about wonder, ritual, letting go of perfection, and three magic words that actually did change my life. It’s I Heart This, my friends. I’m Ben Lord. Let’s talk about what we love.
#gratitude #hedonictreadmill #personalgrowth #dailyrituals #wonder #imperfection
One of my basic assumptions about life is that I really don’t know sh*t. I mean, sure, I know how to find the right bread in the grocery store and set the cruise control on my car. But get much beyond that, and I’m basically just making it all up.
Like, I don’t know answers to any of the important questions. What am I here for? Is there even a reason? What should I do with my life? Is it really wrong to lie about your kid’s age if it saves you, like, ten bucks at the trampoline park?
I have spent a good deal of my life wondering about these kinds of things. In fact, when I was young, I spent so much time thinking about them that sometimes it got in the way of actually living my life.
I was well into my twenties before it occurred to me that lots of people . . . people much smarter than me … had tried to answer these kinds of questions . . . and none of them had come up with answers of convincing certainty. This left me confronting two troubling possibilities. One, that I was probably never going to figure them out. And two, that no one else was going to bail me out.
I was just going to have to make something up.
My first attempts at made-up answers to “How should I live my life?” were complicated. With lots of rules and lists of values and things like that. And I really liked writing them out. But it turned out that my four-page vision statement wasn’t that useful when I got scared or lonely or overwhelmed. Even if they did have a ton of well-formatted footnotes. Apparently, all I can really handle … is something really, really simple.
Eventually, I decided on three things: I wanted to be kind. I wanted to be curious. And I wanted to be thankful.
I have no deep philosophical rationale. I picked them because they just felt right.
And they still do.
Full disclosure, I mess up a lot. Not usually so badly that I have to sleep on the couch … but, still … enough that there is no doubt that I still have lots to learn.
To be clear, it’s not hard to be curious or thankful. And it’s not hard to find absolutely jaw-dropping wonders. The world is unendingly strange. It’s just hard to notice sometimes. As a quote from a John Green essay that I’ve often quoted goes, “From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires.”
But Life is busy. It takes up most of my time and all of my weekends. I have lists of emergencies to take care of and lots of habits to keep up, like exercising, getting enough sleep, keeping better track of my finances, saving democracy, and practicing my French so that someday I’ll be able to say something useful in Quebec. I’ve got a job, a family, a house that always needs work, and I still haven’t patched the canoe in the backyard. It’s easy to get to the end of a day and realize that I haven’t taken a moment to be kind or grateful or curious at all.
It’d be nice if I could somehow just leave the appreciation on in the background of all that, but it turns out that my mind only has space for two or three things at a time. Maybe four if I’ve had a Mountain Dew. So, gratitude often gets crowded off my mental table.
I don’t have a solution to this problem. I hear meditation works, It’s on one of my lists. I’m sure I’ll get around to it someday. But until then, I’ve learned to rely on little reminders to pay attention sprinkled throughout the day … one is that my family says a kind of grace at every meal … We all go around and give thanks for something we’re feeling grateful for. Another is that I use certain events as triggers for appreciation, like stepping out the front door or walking down the bread aisle in the grocery store. I forget a lot. But I remember a lot too. And every time I do, I just bring myself back to kindness, curiosity, and thankfulness. I guess it is a kind of meditation.
Okay, so if the first challenge is just to remember to pay attention, and if my solution is to fill my life with little reminders, then that leads directly to the next challenge … which is that habits and rituals get stale. They wear off. I get used to them. Grace at dinner becomes perfunctory, especially if it means waiting to dig into Laura’s stromboli.
Psychologists have a word for this. They call it the hedonic treadmill … which makes it sound like a punishment from the fourth level of purgatory … But whatever you call it, taking things for granted seems to be hardwired into my brain.
The good news, I guess, is that it’s not my fault. And the practical implication is that if I’m going to keep these things alive in my life, then I’ve got to find ways to keep them fresh. Being grateful isn’t something I can put on autopilot. Kindness and curiosity and appreciation require endless creativity. That is, by the way, one of the reasons I produce this podcast. To give myself a regular excuse for finding some new focus for my wonder and gratitude.
Which brings me to challenge number three–holding on to unrealistic expectations. I am the king of this … like when I thought I could live my whole adult life as a caveman or when I sat down and started to read all the books in my college library in order by their call number.
I’m not the only one who struggles with this. A couple of years ago, these people on the internet claimed that everyone was practicing gratitude wrong. They argued that if you really wanted to maximize happiness from your gratitude practice . . . then you should focus on “receiving” gratitude . . . because that’s what studies have shown gives you the biggest happiness boosts.
Okay … WTF?
First of all, I think chasing happiness like it’s something you can acquire is a surefire way to scare it away. Do kindness and appreciation usually make me feel good? Sure. Absolutely! But that’s not why I try to be kind and grateful! I try because they are beautiful, even if they don’t make you happy.
I mean, I love rapturous exuberance as much as the next guy. But it doesn’t always happen that way. Sometimes I’m tired, and a quiet noticing that something is not wrong is all I have the energy for. When I’m sick, apparently my appreciation comes out as gushing melodrama. At my grandmother’s funeral I was grateful to have known her and loved her and for the loving family she left behind, but it still felt like shit.
I don’t usually get caught up in using a gratitude practice, or whatever, to chase happiness. But I still do make the mistake of expecting it to feel or be a certain way. My particular brand is that I expect that I can achieve it somehow as if it were a kind of permanent state. That if I just try hard enough, I can somehow be kind and curious and thankful all the time.
But that is like trying to be awake all the time. It’s impossible to do, and it’s harmful to try. Still, at times, I’ve hoped that if I just keep doing more of the work that awe requires, then I won’t miss any of the wonders.
But I will. My capacity for wonder is limited by my short life and small mind. And I will never be able to take it all in. And I have to let that go. My heart and my attention are wild. I can influence them. But mostly they go where they will. And I don’t think it’s right to try and cage or train wild things.
So here’s what I tell myself these days about living a life of appreciation: to fill my life with rituals of thanksgiving and reminders that I live in a world of wonders … to find new ways to see them with new eyes … to let go, as much as I can, of what that experience will be like … to accept the fact that I’ll never perfect my heart, and to remember that I don’t actually want to.
I still don’t know sh*t … and I’m still just making all of this up as I go. But it doesn’t bother me as much anymore. It turns out that it’s kind of nice when nobody knows the answer to all the big questions. Cause that means you get to pick some answers for yourself. And I am proud of the simple code I have chosen. I think it’s beautiful.
Even if I am not enlightened. Even if I am not awake all the time, I have had so many moments when I did wake up. I have had so many times when I look around my messy little house, with all of my unrealized dreams and a canoe in the back yard that I still haven’t patched … and realize that I am one of the richest, healthiest, most comfortable people in the history of the world. I’ve had so many times when I’ve been delighted by the color of a stone or a beetle or a sky full of stars or the remarkable people that, despite all my imperfections, still choose to spend time with me. I may never publish a book or bike across Europe or reform science education . . . but even if I did all those things … I think dedicating myself to kindness, curiosity, and thankfulness will be the greatest thing I have ever done.
Outro
Know somebody who’s just making it up as they go? Or maybe somebody who wants a canoe in need of patching? Then send them a link to this episode. And if you think that kindness, wonder, and gratitude are worth a few minutes of your time every week, then subscribe to I Heart This on YouTube (link in the description) or wherever you get your podcasts. And thanks for being here.
I Heart This is written, edited, and produced by me, Ben Lord. Our logo was designed by Briony Morrow-Cribbs. Our website is iheartthispodcast.com. You can email me at ben@iheartthispodcast.com. Thank you so much for listening. And, as always, Be kind. Be curious, and be thankful.