Reframing Gratitude: Making it Approachable

A new way to look at and incorporate the practice of gratitude into your life

I have something to admit. I struggle with gratitude. Both with my own personal life practice but also witnessing how other people espouse the idea. To justify my sense of unease, I did a Google image search of the word gratitude and found a series of pictures that are both wildly staged and incredibly confusing. What is a smooth river rock etched with the word “Gratitude” photographed during golden hour amidst hundreds of other rocks supposed to tell me about anything?

Those of you who may be wanting to incorporate the practice of gratitude might be thinking the same thing. Or even more importantly, those that are suffering right now and who truly need the practice might look at things and exclaim, “I am suffering, it is impossible for me to thinking of anything that I am grateful for right now.”

I have been there, both in the depths of my alcoholism as well as going through the difficulties we faced with Lucy. Sometimes life is bearing down on you so much that completing the sentence, “I am grateful for…” is an impossible task.

So don’t do it. Don’t even try. Instead, attempt this reframing that I experienced with Lucy in the hospital.

Read this next prompt, and pause for a moment and see if ideas and connections come to you easier than the previous prompt.

Isn’t it incredible that…

I realized the power of that statement in the hour after Lucy was born. It took about 30 minutes to stabilize Lucy after her birth. After stabilization, we said our goodbyes to Alyssa and the transport team and I took off with Lucy to the NICU.

In the NICU, I was directed to stand outside of her room as it filled with nursing, doctor and specialist staff to move her from her temporary stabilization equipment to her new long term room situation. In the first moments of witnessing this it was a frenzy of activity and an overstimulation of the senses. But as the shock wore off and I stood there watching this team execute their tasks, I was struck with something I never anticipated in that situation.

Gratitude.

I watched the lead nurse on Lucy’s room execute in such a manner that would make any Navy SEAL blush at the idea that they would claim ownership over the mantra of “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast”. In all reality this saying applied only to Jenny, a NICU nurse in Minneapolis. It was like watching the most surreal form of technical artistry and mastery that I have ever witnessed in my life. And she was just one of over a dozen professionals in the room at that moment executing her craft to save our little girl.

There were simultaneous procedures that spun up, were triaged, executed and closed out in the blink of an eye. I was transfixed by the scene. My mind started thinking about how each of these professionals was one in a lineage of other human beings who have obsessed over one singular aspect of the human condition. That obsession led to a lifetime of work and progress that led us to today where their unknown prodigy was saving our little girl.

I realized in that moment that there were thousands of individuals involved in the care and stabilization of Lucy just in those early moments in the NICU.

It was indeed incredible.

So for those of you who may be put off by the standard approach to gratitude, as I was for years, I implore you to attempt to complete this alternate statement and see how it might shift your perspective, even just slightly.

The world is truly incredible, there are aspects to it that we take for granted in every single moment, but if we pause and reflect with this perspective it can awaken us to an entire world of wonder.

Isn’t it incredible that…

That’s all I’ve got.

Kyle