Practicing Gratitude on the Canadian Atlantic Coast

“The present moment is filled with joy and happiness.  If you are attentive, you will see it.”

– Thich Nhat Hanh

Several months ago, I posted a blog about my struggles with blisters and bed bugs while walking a part of Spain’s infamous Camino de Santiago.  A Wandering Footsteps reader – a perfect stranger – had responded to my post on Facebook, telling me about the fact that she, a handicapped woman, would have loved to walk the Camino, bed bugs, blisters and all.

Her comment hit home, prompting me to submit a story to a travel writing competition on gratitude put on by We Said Go Travel, a popular travel website.

I found out not long ago that that story – entitled Dear Random Facebook Stranger, Thank You – won third place in the competition!  I was pretty shocked – and chuffed! – because I’d never before received any type of recognition for my writing.

So, just over three weeks ago, I reread the story I had written more than six months before, a story that claims that, because of that Facebook stranger’s Facebook comment, my mindset had begun shifting from one of entitlement to one of gratitude.

And I realized, three weeks ago, that I still have a long way to go in my mindset shift.

Sometimes I write posts on this blog that, instead of being filled with appreciation and wonder for the world, focus on criticism and challenges (like here, here, and here, for instance).  I do this consciously, because I want my blog to be a true reflection of my experiences, not a highly-edited unbalanced snapshot of travel, like many travel blogs out there.  Traveling full-time is amazing – really, REALLY amazing! – but that doesn’t mean that everything is perfect everywhere all the time.  It’s not all tropical beaches, cocktail happy hours, jaw-dropping scenery, and profound cultural exchange.  I want my blog to provide a judicious personal opinion (I was a philosophy student, after all) of different places and experiences, and I want people dreaming about or planning this lifestyle to have an accurate picture it, good and bad.

But I do also know that, mixed in there with my desire to be truthful and discerning, there is sometimes a loss of perspective.  A forgetting of the fact that I am traveling around the world.  With a man I love!  That I don’t have to work!!  That I am free!!!

Sometimes, traveling becomes, well, normal.  It becomes my own personal status quo.  Sometimes, I just forget how lucky I am.  I see the world without my gratitude glasses on.

It is often in these moments that I experience frustration, dissatisfaction, annoyance, impatience, or discomfort.  When I forget my gratitude, I see the negative rather than seeing how plain-and-silly gosh-darn fortunate I am.

Really, I should be walking around with a goofy smile on my face every moment of every day!

Since receiving that eye-opening perspective on Facebook (of all places) last November, I really have been doing mental work to bring gratitude to the forefront of my experiences as often as possible.  But it’s a process.  And one that I don’t seem particularly hard-wired for.

Now that I am in New Brunswick, I’ve had the time to take even more steps toward incorporating gratitude into my perception of reality.  I’ve been following a free online course (through Coursera, a free continuing education website for adults) on Happiness and Fulfilment with Dr. Rajagopal Raghunathan that has helped me bring gratitude into the forefront of my thinking.  I am halfway through a 21-day meditation course with Oprah and Deepak Chopra that, despite being challenging (I struggle with meditation), does remind me that mindfulness naturally brings forth gratitude because it creates presence.  And I’ve recently begun reading a book called The Monks and Me: How 40 Days in Thich Naht Hanh’s French Monastery Guided Me Home, by Mary Paterson, which has got me pondering the wisdom of the Buddhist path toward Enlightenment.

By bringing me intellectually into a space of reflecting on gratitude, happiness, and mindfulness, I find that my spirit is opening more and more, recognizing the things for which I am grateful in my daily life.  As Thich Nhat Hanh says, I am living more attentively, noticing the joy and happiness that is all around me, thereby bringing gratitude into the present moment.

It’s funny how, when you become focussed on something, that thing seems to pop up everywhere.  It’s how I fell upon the Happiness and Fulfilment course on a podcast I was listening to, and it’s how I stumbled upon The Monks and Me on my mom’s bedside table.

Well, gratitude recently popped up on the website of my favourite travel writer, Candace Rose Rardon (whom I’ve talked about before here because she’s the one that designed the cover art for this blog!)  Candace recently returned from a trip to Norway, and she published a poignant short post about finding gratitude in the little town of Tromsø.  She admitted, too, to sometimes struggling to be present in the here and now, to “miming each moment for the simple riches it contains.”

While reading The Future of Ice: A Journey Into Cold, by Gretel Ehlrich, Candace discovered a way to express her gratitude on a daily basis – by finishing her journal entries, no matter how negative the tone or challenging the day, with an expression of gratitude.  Inspired by Ehlrich’s words –“Today it is enough to make a shadow – she looks for what about that day was enough.

I tend to have a forward-gazing look.  To be thinking about the future, making plans, dreaming big, always wanting more.  While I do believe it is good to push oneself, to set goals, and squeeze as much as possible out of life, it is equally good to stop in the now and recognize that you have just enough right here, right now, to be satisfied.

And I have so much.  I have my health, a wonderful family, a man who loves me.  I was born in a country that provided me opportunities so that I could flourish and a passport so that I could traverse the world freely.  If I had nothing more than that, it would already be enough.

So I make a pledge to you today, dear Wandering Footsteps readers – a public pledge so that I may hold myself accountable in my moments of forgetting.  I still want my blog to be honest and discerning.  I still want to write about travel challenges, about less-than-stellar moments, about uninspiring (to me) places, and difficult experiences.  But I also want to be able to filter out ungrateful negativity from the true-honest-and-necessary stuff, and make sure that doesn’t make it onto the blog.  I want to water my seeds of gratitude, positivity, and enoughness.  There’s enough of the opposite in the world.