When What Simply Is, Is More Than We Realize
Recognizing what is already in you is the starting point
I was not looking for gratitude this morning.
I was just sitting in my home office, in the early quiet, while my husband and dog slept in the other room. My coffee was warm, the aroma filling my space. The sky outside was the particular gray that comes before rain, and then it came: the sound of it on the roof first, and then the sight of it on the windows, the screens, the street. Small percussive splatterings. The kind of sound that does not ask anything of you.
I smiled already knowing the likely protests and procrastination that would come with having to go outside for a potty walk in the wetness.
I also smiled because I was already inside something worth smiling about.
Here is the thing underneath that thing that made me smile, the realization that settled in quietly, the way the rain had.
Before I could appreciate the sound of rain, I had to be able to hear it.
Before I could witness the drops hit the glass, I had to be able to see.
Before I could walk from my office to the kitchen, I had to be able to move. To cross a room. To carry a cup from one place to another without negotiating with my body to do it.
Before I could feel grateful for my husband down the hall, I had to be able to love. It means something particularly tender to me as a gay man in a world that does not always make space for our love.
I can taste. I can touch. I can smell. I can hear quiet and then hear rain. I can see beauty. I can love and be loved and know how it feels.
These things simply are.
I did not earn them. I did not practice my way into them. I did not maintain a discipline to keep them. They were here before I thought to be grateful for them, and they will continue whether I acknowledge them or not.
And, not everyone has them. This is worth sitting with, respectfully and gently, without rushing to the next thought.
This is where I think gratitude practices generally begin a step too far ahead.
We are taught to look outward — to find the things, name the things, list the things: the home, the coffee, the morning. While those are all real, they are downstream of something more fundamental. The rain is only available to me because I can hear and see. The coffee is only available to me because I can inhale the aroma, taste it, feel if it’s too hot, blow on it to cool it off, and hold and bring a cup to my mouth. The love in the next room is only available to me because something in me is built to give and receive it.
Gratitude practices matter. The discipline of pausing, of naming, of returning your attention to what is good — that is real and worth doing. But I wonder if we sometimes begin the practice one layer too late. We search for what surrounds us, as though gratitude were a mineral buried deep that requires excavation, when there is something even more foundational waiting to be seen first — the simple, unearned fact that we are here to notice anything at all.
None of this is an invitation to spiritual or emotional bypassing, or to drape gratitude over what genuinely hurts. Some mornings are not quiet and warm. Some mornings are grief, or exhaustion, or a particular heaviness that does not lift just because you named three things you appreciate. Those mornings are real and they deserve to be felt fully, without rushing them toward resolution. We do not heal what we do not allow ourselves to actually experience. Even then, in the hardest of it all, the foundation does not disappear. The capacity to feel the heaviest of feelings is itself the gift. Then, when you are ready, when the weight has been honored and moved through, the first step back is not complicated.
The practice of gratitude becomes richer, I think, when it begins not with what is around you, or what you experience, but with recognizing what is already in you.
What is in me makes possible everything I get to witness and experience.
This is where I’d suggest beginning — with what is already running, already faithful, already offering itself without condition or complaint. The quiet gift of a life that simply works. That simply is.
You didn’t have to strive for it.
It just is.
What a thing, that it just is.
Before you name what you're grateful for today — what capacities are you grateful through? What is already in you that makes everything else possible to receive?
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