Catherine Drea: Gratitude

Oh we all love a good old moan! It’s part of getting through the day I suppose. From the first question in the morning, “Did you sleep well?” to the last one “Sleep tight!” there are a myriad of opportunities to complain.

I make the mistake quite often of just asking the wrong question. A recent visitor was a case in point. While I was making his favourite sausage and egg breakfast he would be listing his misadventures of the previous night. “Oh, I didn’t sleep a wink! I’m not used to that kind of mattress. Where did you get it? Ikea? Well that explains it!” And on and on it would go.

Mmm.

So I was recently reading about writer Grace Paley who studied her father’s happiness in old age and asked him for the secret of it. Apparently how we wake up in the morning, and taking control of that, adds years to our lives. Well so I like to think after reading his advice.

Think about those first few moments. Most of my life used to be dominated by getting out of the house as quickly as possible in order not to be late for something. It often required getting other people out the door as well. Hence, my first reaction on waking was usually to jump out of bed and run like a mad woman around the house dragging people out of bed.

Breakfast, meditation and positive thinking did not exist in that world. The old man’s advice would be to set the alarm for an earlier time so that when you wake up you can pause… ha!

Now that I have all the time in the world most days I tend not to pause. The bleary-eyed habit of reaching for the radio and the phone to see if the apocalypse took place in the middle of the night is always my first response on waking.

So Grace Paley’s father suggests that every morning we wake up and pause, breathe and take our heart in our hands. He simply reminds himself of his always beating heart and the work that it does every day to keep him alive. He places his hands on his heart as if to cup it and expresses his gratitude. Yes, he talks to his heart!

Holy Moly! I would never have thought of that. How we wake up and our first moments influence our whole day. You only have to remember those days when you were very late for something. I was recently late for the train. I caught the train by seconds, but the state I was in took the good out of the journey and the day ahead. I was in some weird state of rushing all day.

So I’m going to try to practice this kind of morning gratitude and also improve my chit chat questions with others. Instead of asking “Well, how did you sleep?” I’m going to say “What a lovely day it is! Aren’t we blessed to have another one!” 

This is a lesson I learned from my own father. The older he got, the more disabled he was, (blind and deaf), the happier he seemed. Or maybe it wasn’t happiness so much as a realisation about the precious mystery of life. His phrase was always, “Another day is a bonus!” and every morning he would tuck in to his favourite porridge and cold milk, delighted with himself.

I love to talk to random people that I meet. Three French tourists in Tramore who look lost, an elderly man in the supermarket who is having trouble bending, a young couple with a crying toddler. But it’s important to find the right question there too.

The French tourists were highly amused when I asked them if they were going for a swim. Wrapped up in anoraks, hiking boots and very chic scarves they then chatted away about the bonkers Irish on the beach and in the sea while they were freezing and looking for hot drinks. They went from looking concerned to being highly amused.

When I asked an elderly woman about her health, she first told me all the crap she was going through but we ended with a good laugh about all our wonky bits and how we were blessed to be out at all on this windy old day.

Ten times a day now I think about all the ways we could be grateful; for peace on our island, for family and friends, for having enough to eat and a roof over our heads, for babies, for flowers, for Seagull Bakery, for fish and chips after a cold dip in the icy sea.

None of this stops me checking on the coming apocalypse. I can’t look and yet can’t look away from the wars and the hate. I don’t want to be a kind of Pollyanna living in denial about the awful state of the world. But there is a place to count your own blessings at the same time as being what Desmond Tutu called a “prisoner of hope”. There’s an art to this practice no doubt.

How about at least once a day we ask ourselves this question, what are you grateful for today? So, here I go, today, I’m grateful for summer, talking to strangers and coffee. How about you?