Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

― Mary Oliver

Optimism is my superpower.

When I got laid off from an old job, ~6 weeks after I had just bought a house, one day before my birthday, I went out the door laughing. It was unhinged. I had no idea what I was going to do, how I was going to pay my mortgage. But I couldn’t stop laughing- and comforting my coworkers that I was going to be ok.

I know that it is easy to dwell on the world as a dumpster fire of misery and inequity. And I also know what its like to live with depression, when its hard to feel anything at all. There aren’t easy answers to these feelings, because they’re part of life. We aren’t meant to not feel pain or numbness, just like we aren’t meant to feel happy all the time. We are just meant to be.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, being an optimist. Did you read my newsletter last week about the binge drinking and the diarrhea? I have to make sure my optimism is embodied, and not a coping mechanism. But for the most part, even when things get really scary, a little part of me holds the hope.

And I sincerely attribute my sense of optimism to an ongoing commitment to gratitude. For me, gratitude and awe goes hand in hand. It’s a practice of looking around wherever I am - the Grand Canyon, or Costco, and being able to say “wow, can you believe I get to be here?”

When I was first started my Peace Corps service, I went and visited another volunteer who had already been in her site for a year. Getting to her village was a multi hour bus ride through the mountains, absolutely gorgeous. The landscape around her village was so lush and vibrant and completely different than suburban Maryland, where I was from. When I got off the bus, I asked her if she was totally blown away that she got to live in such a spectacular place. She shrugged and said she didn’t really notice it anymore. And that shook me!! I promised myself that I would never take the beauty of Indonesia for granted.

Then I moved to Pittsburgh as a young adult, and it was a little … tense between my family back in Maryland and I. Moving to Pittsburgh was a hard earned step in my adulthood. I used to drive from Monroeville to Green Tree for work (people not from Pittsburgh, that’s a pretty long commute. There are two tunnels and a bridge involved). On my way home, I’d drive over the Fort Pitt bridge and see the park at the convergence of Pittsburgh’s three rivers - and I’d feel so thankful. So grateful that I had made this huge change in my life and in family expectations. Crossing that bridge became an intentional ritual of gratitude that I still practice almost 10 years later - it brings me to the present moment and it feels me with joy.

When there is an ease in noticing and feeling thankful for the present moment, wherever we might be, we build towards an ease in holding hope. We build towards an ease in finding contentment. So I hope you find your own little rituals of gratitude that carry you beyond this week, and for the next ten years!