Lessons from a gratitude jar

I am sure you are probably thinking to yourselves…this’ll be a quick one CC…we know what you learned from your jar…You are FULL of Gratitude!?!?!?!?!?!

HAHAHA…well, you aren’t wrong…BUT…I observed so much more!!!

Keeping a block of post it notes beside the jar made it VERY easy to jot something down and throw it in and while I had a pretty good idea of what I would find when I looked back over them, I was stunned at the lessons echoing there.

So, I’ve wrestled with the “not knowing” of things for years, 2020 was no different. In all of this I realized that feeling has a lot of different names…uncertainty, anxiety, impatience, fear, self doubt, obsession and even paranoia. ALL of those words come with some pretty unmatched baggage.

I opened SO many post it’s that read things like “awakening”, “figured out”, “got confirmation”, “finally understand”…to…”30 days”, “60 days”, “334 days”, “6 months” etc…NONE of those made me FEEL grateful. They made me wonder why I bothered measuring anything when I clearly had a hard time soaking in the seemingly same AH-HA moments. ONE of them said “hamster wheel” and I got hit right in the gut with the fact that I’d been creating that very hamster wheel, over and over again…all year…

B O O M…

Now, not all of them were like that. I managed to write down some pretty incredible moments, moments that took the subtle but constant frustration in my heart to that place of quiet joy and warmth, the kind of place that turns the corners of your mouth UP in genuine appreciation…maybe I didn’t miss it ALL in being in my head SO OFTEN…maybe…

I ripped almost all of 2020s gratitude up and threw them away, praying that as I did, I would put away the part of me that gets so caught in the Doing that she isn’t Being…that I wouldn’t write a single thing down for the sake of “keeping up with it” but instead pay attention to the FEELINGS…that I would write down nothing but the times that made my heart sing SO LOUDLY that I’d want to literally bottle it up…

Folks…The bottom line here is, the only thing(s) I am good at start and end with living from my HEART. I am a lover, giver and server. That’s gotten twisted and manipulated (by my own self and others) so many times it seems impossible BUT it’s the first place I go when I want to truly understand…anything outside of that creates that season of my soul where I TRY TOO HARD, which creates inauthenticity, which creates uncertainty, self doubt, fear, obsession, paranoia and frustration. Does that hamster wheel sound familiar to anyone else.

God wanted me to get this before the year is over and I am 100% sure of it because I had post it note proof of it…

There isn’t any value in what we keep up with if it doesn’t ultimately feed our souls…so, for me, that means a lot less keeping up with days/dates/times/weeks/months and more “how wide did my smile get that time”, “wow, that cry felt really amazing”, “I am SO into this moment I forgot to capture it on social media”, “Gosh, I love them”, “I hope there are 1,000 more days like that one”…

Please don’t get me wrong here, shit happens and I am not saying I’ll glaze over what’s put in path to continue to stretch and grow me…what I’m saying is that I am done dwelling there.

In 2021, I want to follow the road up/down/and around the bend with (as someone very dear to me once said) no rear view mirrors and I want to dump out my giant sized jar at the end of it and say “YEAH GIRL, YOU LIVED!!!”