9 - Gratitude
Several years ago, a good friend of mine moved from a large, bustling concrete fortress of a city to a remote small town surrounded by lakes and forests. It sounds like the premise of a prime time sitcom (especially considering how much my friend liked their downtown apartment, choice of coffees from all sorts of eclectic cafes and the busy pace of the people on the paved streets). But contrary to what you’d expect, my friend did very well with the transition and fell in love with the new environment. My friend still lives there today, having developed a home, a family and a true love of nature.
I remember talking to this friend after they moved and settled in. They work with nearby and even more remote communities. The culture there has a great respect for the nature that surrounds them, though they don’t have access to a lot of the resources that we would find common in urban centres.
“Have you thanked your shower today?” my friend asked. This was one of the questions that they were asked when they started getting more involved in the cultural communities. Because, despite how easily accessible clean safe water is in my city (all I have to do is turn a knob and otherwise don’t think twice about where it comes from or how much I’m using), water isn’t that infinite. There are many communities around the world that don’t have easy access to water. Others may have to boil or ration their supply. There exist even places in Canada that don’t have a clean safe source and therefore must depend on shipments of bottled water! There isn’t a day that goes by when we don’t depend on this resource. In my apartment alone, there are three taps, plus one in the basement and an attachment to a washing machine. If I’m out around town, I can get water from public fountains or ask for a glass wherever I go, without hesitation. Yet, it’s not often that I’ve stopped and thought about how grateful I am to have this completely accessible to me.
In TBI, there’s a lot of pain and a lot of loss. Regardless of health status, I think for a lot of people it’s natural to focus on the negative — on what isn’t going well; on what we don’t have. In TBI, we lose our abilities to work, exercise, read, use screens, make future plans, maybe even speak, recall memories, make decisions, earn stable income. We may also lose relationships and a sense of self; we lose our identity. It seems like a shit storm of negativity — like nothing will ever go well ever again. But in that pit of despair, despite how dark, dreary and torturous, there is still a lot to be grateful for.
You’ve probably heard of this exercise: before bed, before a meal, or when you wake up in the morning, list at least 5 things you are grateful for. Indeed, before the injury, I was attending fairly regular counselling sessions. This “gratitude list” was one of the exercises we tried. I believe the idea was to help get me out of the doom-spiral by noticing the positive things in my life as well as my own strengths. From there, I could build on what I could do so that even in my struggles, I may suffer less.
In looking through my journals of the past three years, I came across one of my gratitude lists, so I thought I’d share it. I wrote this on September 3, 2015 at 5 AM, three months after my injury, and at that time I wasn’t doing very well at all.
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| (The actual page from my journal) |
What strikes me most about this list is that it’s all still true today. I could have written this list at almost anytime, brain injury or not. (I’ve long been helped by physio for climbing injuries, LOL) It reminds me that I can still enjoy and experience what matters, (building relationships, taking care of myself, being a part of a community, being creative, enjoying nature) even if how I do so is in a different way than before.
I’m not in a position to say whether this exercise is actually helpful for everyone. What I’m aiming to share here is that even in the darkest depths of our despair (regardless of your brain and health status), there is still something good going on. There is a lot to be grateful for, so I’ll end on this: Have you thanked your shower today?
- Krystal
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