A common piece of advice I encountered while dealing with depression was to write a daily list of three things I was grateful for. Channeling gratitude, they say, is the antidote to the negativity bias that is revved up to the maximum setting in the depressed brain.
I mean, it sounds nice. It makes logical sense. But for some reason I just felt like screaming every time someone told me to do this.
Maybe part of the problem was that it felt like homework. The dutiful student in me felt the need to find the “right” answer, and would freeze up when faced with those three blank bullet points. I’d end up with variations on the same list every day.
I’m grateful for…
My family
My health
My home
Though it was a perfectly fine list, it wasn’t particularly creative or insightful. It also felt like a list of things I knew I should be grateful for, but I wasn’t really able to actually feel the gratitude. Because all of those things had a flip side:
I love my family, but I am letting them down by infecting our home with my unrelentingly dark mood.
Technically, I have good physical health at the moment, but that could change at any time. (Also my mind is a mess and depression/anxiety makes me feel awful and exhausted, so how healthy am I, really??)
I’m fortunate to have stable housing, but it isn’t fair that I have this when so many others don’t.
It felt like I was failing at gratitude, just like I was failing at everything else. I also didn’t feel I deserved any of the things I was grateful for, and that some cosmic intervention could rip them away from me at any moment.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who finds it very, VERY hard to simply appreciate the now without also being aware that it will soon change. So much of the human experience is tinged with anticipatory grief.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that gratitude can sometimes be wielded like a weapon. “You should be grateful it wasn’t worse” or “At least you still have [fill in the blank]” are common well-meaning responses when a person is dealing with a loss or recovering from something that has shaken, or shattered, their world. It feels very dismissive to be told to just look on the bright side, to find the silver lining, to remember what you’re grateful for.
This doesn’t just apply to what other people tell us. It happens within ourselves, too. I know that when a part of me is hurting and scared, and I tell it to suck it up and stay positive, the wound only deepens; the part knows it’s being ignored and grows even more frustrated and resentful. What it needs instead is to be seen exactly as it is, to have its pain acknowledged, to be lovingly cradled as it ugly-cries in the dark.
It’s not like gratitude itself is the problem. It is good to recognize the beautiful, sweet, incredible, awe-inspiring gifts we encounter as we go about our days. Is there a way to do that without bypassing negative emotions entirely, while also grappling with the very human tendency to fear change and loss?
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I tend to look to Nature as my role model for dealing with sticky issues like this. Her stance is fairly clear.
Watch the moon as it fills with brightness, then recedes into the dark, then gradually becomes bright again.
Watch the cells grow and divide. Watch them break down into their component fragments when their pre-programmed self-destructive module is initiated. Watch as these pieces are reassembled into a young new cell.
Watch the seeds burst into flower and fruit. Watch their stalks wither and rest their desiccated seed heads on the frozen ground. Watch the new shoots emerge from the muddy spring earth.
It’s there everywhere we look. The life/death/rebirth cycle. A spiral without end. One that—like it or not—we experience within our bodies and our lives every single day.
Time itself can also be thought of as spiralic. The night/day cycle. The seasonal cycle. Loops within loops! Yet, we tend to see time as linear, which is understandable since our bodies experience time in a fairly linear progression. But we all know that our minds are time-travelers, that they can zip between present and past and future within the same minute. The future-travel is what gives rise to all that anticipatory grief.
I wonder often if the notion that time is linear is similar to the idea that the world is flat. If we limit our understanding to what our material bodies perceive, both of those things certainly appear true. But if we zoom out far enough—if we open our minds to the possibility that our perceptions never quite tell the whole story—we can start to see the curves, the roundness, the spiral.
Maybe that’s our way out. Or, to put it more precisely, our way through. If we remember to zoom out enough to see the whole life/death/rebirth spiral in all its omnipresent forms, maybe we don’t have to cling so hard to any one of those aspects.
It’s a nice thought. Actually doing it is, of course, a different story.
I still wanted to give some sort of gratitude practice a go. But I wanted one that allowed for the fact that some days, gratitude just cannot be found. I also wanted something that would be a little more inspiring and/or comforting than a list of fairly abstract concepts.
Recently, I learned from a dear witch-friend how to cast a time spell. The process is straightforward yet powerful; it involves intentionally capturing a sweet moment with lots of sensory detail in your mind, so that whenever you need to, you can slide back down the time spiral and re-experience it.
But it’s not the same, I can hear my kids saying. No, it will never be exactly the same. The moment has already lived and died—but the emotional imprint of that moment can be reborn at will. (True, there are no guarantees that any of us will retain our memories throughout our entire lifespan. But you can certainly record your captured memories in some way, if you want to have an external record to look back on later.)
Inspired by this approach, I’ve started a habit of looking for glimmers throughout the day. Small, specific, fleeting moments when I find myself filling up with love, awe, appreciation, wonder, or… gratitude, I guess. Then I’ll try to capture the moment by taking a fully dimensional mental snapshot of it. And that is what I’ll jot down later, a description of that moment, instead of a list that may be true but feels impersonal and generic.
So instead of writing, “I’m grateful for my family,” I would say…
My daughter and I step out of the sweet shop in a small mountain town, holding the warm churros we’d patiently waited on for the past ten minutes. To our surprise, snowflakes had begun falling gently from the sky while we were inside. “It’s snowing!” she says with such joy that I find myself also exclaiming in delight. I bite into a churro and my mouth fills with crispy cinnamon sweetness. The cold air on my cheeks. Nearby children whooping as they zoom down the snowy hill on their sleds. My daughter smiling beside me.
I say goodbye to the kids and head up the stairs at our neighborhood cafe. Here, it’s warm and cozy and smells of coffee and roasted potatoes, but I’m sneaking out while the kids are occupied to steal some precious alone-time. As I reach the top of the stairs, my spouse is just heading down to bring the kids their food orders. An old-timey song swells in the background as he gives me a quick goodbye kiss, and I feel so much love for him, for all the ways he understands and supports me and our kids, and as I kiss him back I feel for a second I feel like I’m in a movie—how on earth is this actually my life??
My son putters around in the kitchen cooking pasta as I work on the dishes. For the most part, we’re quiet, each lost in our own worlds. Then he speaks and for a second my heart leaps into my throat—who said that? who else is here?—but it’s just that sometimes his newly-deep voice sounds unfamiliar to my ears. He’s changing so fast now, nearly taller than I am, what a strange and beautiful thing it is to witness, and I want to go in for a random hug but I settle for working alongside him in the kitchen, the smell of garlic, the rolling gurgle of the boiling water, the sweetness of having him so close, the two of us moving around in the same space together.
Writing this list, I found myself getting emotional. After all, just five or so years from now, both of my kids will be grown and I’ll be wistfully looking back to the times when we were together every day. How tempting it is to wish it could be like this forever and ever. But it won’t. And it shouldn’t, actually. But knowing that I can float back down the spiral and conjure up one of these moments, or countless others that I’m collecting, is a great comfort to me. There are so many, and they are so deeply nourishing, that I don’t have to cling.
This is what I couldn’t quite get to with my initial gratitude practice. For one, it’s not just an abstract intellectual exercise. It’s a way to conjure up emotion—and even if what arrives is bittersweet, it can lead to a moment of catharsis where a bit of fear or negativity can be transformed and released.
Somehow it seems like there is less expectation with this method, too. Instead of forcing myself to come up with a daily list, I can now tell myself, “I’ll stay on the lookout for these glimmers, but if I don’t find one today, that’s all right. I can always page through my mental scrapbook to find a moment I experienced where I felt good. Because if I felt that way once, I can feel that way again. It might not happen today. But maybe it will soon.”
In the end, it gets straight to the heart of gratitude in all its expansiveness and complexity. And that’s when I can feel it for real, a profound thankfulness for just being alive today.
Capturing a Moment
These are the general steps I follow when I’m capturing a moment (or, as I personally prefer to frame it, casting a time spell). But these certainly aren’t hard-and-fast rules. The point is to engage all your senses and be fully present for the moment as it unfolds. How you go about doing that is totally up to you!
Breathe in deeply.
Feel your points of contact with the earth.
Exhale slowly.
What do you see? Hear? Smell? Taste? What other sensations are inviting your attention?
Think (or whisper) your intention to yourself: I will always remember this moment.
If you’re with other people, and they’re game to participate, invite them to pause and capture the moment with you. Breathe in and out together, each of you recording your own version of this memory. Look into their eyes—really take them in, exactly as they are in this moment. It might feel a bit wacky, so laugh about it together if you want to!
The moment will pass. But someday, when you are trying to think of what there is to be grateful for in this world, you can go back there. You can conjure up, in great detail, a moment that felt outside of time, transcendent, beautiful. Let it flow through you, let those emotions stay as long as they want to, and let them go when they are ready to depart. This isn’t about clinging to the past. It’s about staying aware, noticing these moments when they arrive, savoring them while they last, and building a thick mental scrapbook that you can look through whenever you need it most.