Being grateful, and all that shit

it's cool to make lists about what you did in 2023

Congratulations, it’s the end of the year.

I don’t feel shy to say to you - although I don’t know who is reading in particular - I’m proud of you this year for:

— not having mental breakdown; or

— having had at least 1 (one) mental breakdown and successfully completed it; or

— presently enduring a mental breakdown - you can do it!

Although I’m being tongue-in-cheek I’m overcome with this chesty, almost menthol-y sense of gratitude.

Most of us know the basic mechanics of gratitude. Your TikTok self-help guru, LSD shaman, or corporate wellness seminar maybe taught you to sit down and write down three things you’re grateful for at the end of every day, and see if you gradually start to feel changed.

I did that almost every day 2023 in my phone journal, and it’s pretty good, but I think I can do you one better.

Here’s the way I do it. When I think of gratitude I go deep rather than broad: Select one ordinary thing and visualise everything that had to be true for it to be in your life. It’s like following the roots of a tree. A book on your table, or the post office - whatever. Stick with it for a long time, like fifteen minutes.

Something that becomes very clear when you sit on a singular thing long enough is exactly how much effort and luck is involved in anything at all for it to be the way it is. The other thing that happens is that good and bad become very blurry. I won’t say more, because I think you should just try it.

I think its much more interesting for addressing the kinds of problems we have in rich Western country land versus considering three things we’re grateful for on a shallow level. We all already have a notion that we have a lot, but what we don’t understand well is the value of individual pieces of it, which tracks sort of inversely proportionally to how much we have.

You can always feel like you have a lot, if you’re willing to blow up the level detail enough.

End of year reflection can be pretty self-focused. For fun, I’d like to half-heartedly blame it on capitalism. Specifically, the valorization of smashing goals, and furthermore, that goal-setting is mainly about doing something Cool, Sexy, and ego-bolstering, like becoming hot, or getting promoted.

Although I still earnestly and diligently do try to be more hot, and get promoted, I was curious how it feels to consider my development as interconnected with the development of others. So I thought about the evolution of my own little ecosystem a bit.

Here’s a non-comprehensive list of people I’m proud of this year:

— Someone with a taste for the Good Life, is always comfortable telling you he loves you, and when he hugs you he REALLY hugs you;

— Someone who is hellbent on making misfit people comfortable to the point of gut twisting self deprecation, on accepting the most scorned as fundamentally worthy, and resents any invitation to care about who you are in terms of your success;

— Someone who hustles, always says exactly what she means with razor sharp clarity in service of craft and honesty but most importantly being hilarious;

— Someone who is somehow charmingly coy and confident who invites other people to come out of their shell by being unabashedly introverted, playful, nerdy and schemes for a great vision of virtuous cycles of inspiration - a conspirator of connection;

— Someone who takes the good and bad and cruel and sublime of life in full stride and carries both sensuality and nurturance gracefully;

— Someone whose funny bone is perfectly tuned to the hum of absurdity, is an unflappable friend of the dark and weird and has an unending curiosity to unravel any given philosophical thread;

— Someone with a continuously surprising vocabulary who splits people open with a raw display of openheartedness and personally-shaved parmesan cheese;

— Someone who is terrifyingly competent and whose presence emits a grounding sense of assuredness to you instantly;

— Someone who is always working on something very interesting, talks a mile a minute bouncing with ideas, and who never stops holding a microscope to the weird worms and wrigglies of their own internal cave;

— Someone who makes anyone feel brighter instantly, seems to not struggle at all with the balance of being frank and kind, and will Truly Listen to your answer to her questions;

— Someone who is refreshingly goofy, a prolific bastion of creativity and yet deeply, almost coolly conscientious, who does quarterly reviews of her own life, and is therefore unsurprisingly a formidable force of achievement;

— Someone who has a fierce, whole-hearted irrevocable trust in others of any level of confidence to step into their own power, and knows exactly where she draws a hard line and where else to be soft;

— Someone with a desire to do the correct thing on the deepest, deepest spiritual level with a strong reaction to doing anything less than, whose sense of internal alignment is tuned with the precision and fragility of an atomic clock;

— Someone with such free flowing gratitude that gladly is impossible to evade, who transmutes disaster without a shred of cynicism but only a lyrical plea for us to be better, which itself implies a sense of belief;

— Someone who has an insane amount of self belief and internal control, that makes having ridiculous ambitions seem very matter of fact, with an intimate understanding for the ways the mind can exert its will upon the body;

— Someone who has unshakeable faith in impermanence, the healing power of being very very incurably silly, lacks any ability to take his problems out on other people, and honestly is one hell of an operator;

There are more in my mind, only because I’m too embarrassed to share how much I’ve thought about you. I am proud of all of you, but more accurately, I am lucky to be a side character to the triumphs and tribulation of your particular weird story.

May you become even more hot in the new year,
Marlene