Gratitude in Practice: Nicole

Today’s guest needs no introduction – and she’s actually “visited” me here before – but I’ll give her a quick one anyway.

Nicole is a glass half-full (and let’s pour the drink into a beautiful cup and savour it on the porch while watching the sunrise) kind of person. When I decided to ask a few blogging friends to help me wrap up this month of gratitude, it’s no wonder Nicole instantly leapt to mind.

(And you’ll be happy to know there are pictures of Rex!)

Enough blabbering from me – it’s time to hear from Nicole <3

When Elisabeth asked me to write about finding joy in gratitude for her month of FIGs, I was thrilled. I am a generally optimistic person and I don’t have a hard time finding gratitude. I immediately started listing off the things I am so grateful for: family, friends, my dog, and the modern miracles of running water and electricity. Luckily, she had specific questions for me, so that I didn’t just hand her a giant list that included everything from my husband to fuzzy slippers. [I’m sure your husband will be relieved to have been listed ahead of fuzzy slippers.]

Do you have any daily or weekly gratitude practices?

I do and I don’t. Most of the time I do not make a conscious effort to have gratitude, it’s something that just seeps into my life. I practice yoga and meditation early in the morning, every morning, and while I practice I’ll look out the window and just feel grateful: grateful to move my body, grateful to have this time and practice, and grateful to see the sky. I always recall the Mary Oliver poem I Wake Close To Morning that begins “Why do people keep asking to see God’s identity papers, when the darkness opening into morning is more than enough?” [I wonder if Oliver had just finished reading Psalm 19: 1-2 which reads: “The heavens keep telling the wonders of God, and the skies declare what he has done. Day after day they continue to speak; night after night they make him known.“]

When I was young I read the Emily Starr books, by LM Montgomery, and I remember feeling that her life was extremely relatable. Emily describes something she calls the flash which is a feeling of awe that is experienced outside in nature. I knew exactly what she meant, because it happens to me too. Every morning when Rex and I go on our walks, I look around me and try to notice things, little and big, that bring that flash feeling to me. [I’ll admit as the mother to a tween boy, I cannot hear the word “flash” without immediately picturing the superhero!]

What does your gratitude practice look like during difficult seasons of life?

During the pandemic I became friends, via Instagram, with a woman who had attended a few of my yoga classes prior to lockdown. I hadn’t seen her in a few years at that point, but I thought nothing of it. People come and go in the yoga world, class schedules change and if I had thought about it, which I didn’t, I would have assumed she was just going to a different class. She had come to my big, busy Ashtanga classes so I knew her to see her, but I didn’t know her well. It wasn’t until the pandemic that I learned a few things about her: she was a year younger than I was, she had three young daughters, and she was dying of metastatic breast cancer.

Melanie was featured on a locally made podcast called Sorry, I’m Sad, and I listened to it on one of my interminable pandemic walks, in 2021. On the podcast she talked about seasons: how in the dark and cold of January she enjoyed taking photos of the stunning winter sunsets, it was her favourite. But then when it was spring, and green shoots started appearing amid the thawing snow, well, that was also her favourite. She said her favourite season was always the current one; she embraced the season that she was in.

To say this affected me deeply would be a vast understatement. I could not stop thinking about it. Here was this woman, whose bones had crumbled from cancer and chemotherapy, who walked around in constant pain with cracked ribs and a hip replacement and spinal compression, who had three daughters that she would never see reach the teen years, let alone grow up, who was 45 and would die before her next birthday, here was Melanie, talking about the seasons of life and how she embraced them all.

We all have difficult seasons in our lives. Some of those seasons are difficult for specifically personal reasons – illness or injury, perhaps – and some are still personal but wider-reaching reasons such as grief or loss of a loved one. Some seasons are difficult on a global level, like the pandemic, or environmental crises, or our current season of stress and worry that the government of our nearest neighbour is aggressively encroaching on us. All of these things are hard, and cause pain, and can be discouraging and disheartening.

What we focus on is what we see more of. This is not to say that we should ignore the things that are happening around us or discount our feelings of fear and pain; rather, we can acknowledge that many things can happen at the same time. If we can cultivate that gratitude attitude, it can give us strength to face the other things that are happening in the world. [What we focus on is what we see more of. Indeed. Like begets like…]

When I’m feeling overwhelmed, I find I can reset by going outside. I go outside, I notice, I wait for the flash. I meditate. I read a poem or the Desiderata. I think of one good thing, one thing I can be grateful for, and then another. Just like negative thoughts feed on each other, so do grateful ones.

Embrace the Season doesn’t mean we have to be thrilled about the particular hardships of the season we are in; toxic positivity gets us nowhere. But I think we have to just be present, and look for the glimmers of hope and beauty amongst the bleak landscape. The Desiderata ends with “with all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.” It is.

What has most influenced your gratitude practice?

I think the most influential thing for me has been time. Growing older, I am more able to see everyday things that are truly miracles. This might be because I’ll be fifty in a few months and I don’t want to waste however much time I have left mired in unhappiness.

A few years ago, a woman in my yoga class said that gratitude is the first step to happiness, and that resonated with all of us, on that wintry Monday afternoon. Soon after, another woman in that same class brought keychains for me and all the students, stamped with that sentence. [What a great reminder. I suspect a few people stuck in 401 traffic could use a keychain like this to dispel road rage!]

As I write this, I realize how much my yoga students have influenced me. I have taught able bodied young people, I have taught seniors, I have taught people who have had strokes and who were very disabled, and I have taught everyone in between. Each one of them has taught me something, and most of them have taught me about gratitude. One of my stroke survivors had a goal, and that was to be able to get down onto the mat and back up to standing without the aid of a chair or a wall. In the two and a half years I worked with him, that goal was never met, and yet he never stopped trying. He never stopped being grateful for the class, for being there, and for being able to move, even in his limited physical capacity.

What books have most influenced your gratitude practice?

Every morning prior to my yoga practice I read a poem or a short essay, and then I meditate on it throughout my practice. The most influential for me are Mary Oliver’s Devotions, Cleo Wade’s Heart Talk, Morgan Harper Nichol’s All Along You Were Blooming, and Agapi Stassinopoulis’ Wake Up To The Joy In You. I also have my grandmother’s copy of the Desiderata, which is framed and hangs on my wall by my piano. I read it every day. [I will put a plug in for Cleo Wade’s Remember Love which was a 5/5 star read for me.]

How has practicing gratitude influenced your relationships, mindset, and mental health?

I think that if a person has been married or in a relationship for a long time, it’s easy and natural to take that relationship for granted. This is particularly true when children are involved, because life just gets so busy and can be one long firefighting episode after another. [And every mother said Amen. If we’re not fighting proverbial fires, we’re likely cleaning up poop that has hit the fan – perhaps literally.] This is why it’s so important to take a moment to feel gratitude for your partner, as well as gratitude for your friends and family.

Again, what we focus on is what we see more of, and if we can focus on being grateful for what we do have, what is working, what brings us glimmers of joy and hope and happiness, it will only improve our mindset and mental health. Giving in to the grim can lead to spirals and despair and hopelessness, which is exactly what those who wish to oppress or hurt us want to happen.

What’s the most ridiculous or oddly specific thing you can think of being grateful for at the very moment you’re answering these questions?

I am always grateful for running water. Isn’t it incredible that we can just turn on a tap and clean water comes out at the exact temperature we want? Just think about it: there were engineers that designed a water distribution system, there are scientists who figured out how to filter and clean the water for human consumption, someone designed home water heaters and someone else installed one in my home. It’s so incredibly simple on my end, but so incredibly complex to get to that point. In my grandmothers’ and great grandmothers’ lifetimes, there were wells and hand pumps and heating water on the stove. The sheer work that would have gone into a bath, or clean clothes, or even just a cup of coffee was immense. And now, all I have to do is touch the tap. [I cannot imagine handwashing clothes and chopping holes in ice to get water in the winter. And outhouses. Sometimes with multiple seats in one space. I am shuddering.]

What’s a simple, everyday moment that always reminds you to be grateful, no matter how busy life gets?

Every morning when I open my dog Rex’s crate, he behaves as if it has been years since he has seen me. He snuffles his snoot into my legs, he leans on me, he looks up at me with his smiley fuzzy face as if to say “It’s YOU! Yay!” Sometimes I can’t even move because he’s wound his entire body around me. It’s pure joy and it never fails to make me so grateful that we were chosen to be his family. [Rex sounds a lot like Indy in the mornings. He is so snuggly and it’s very nice to feel so loved first thing in the new day!]

If you could thank one object in your house for making your life easier, what would it be and why?

I have already thanked running water, and I am always grateful for electricity – what an everyday miracle it is! – so I will combine them to say The Washing Machine. Clothes go in dirty, and come out clean. All I have to do is pour in detergent and push a button. [Sing it.]

Elisabeth, I am grateful you asked me to write this post about gratitude! I am grateful for you, and for all of our readers. xo

Thank you Nicole. This post was such a pleasure to read and gave me renewed enthusiasm for my own gratitude practices.

Now it’s your turn.

• If you could thank one object in your house for making your life easier, what would it be and why?
• Who (or what) has most influenced your gratitude practice?
• What’s a simple, everyday moment that always reminds you to be grateful, no matter how busy life gets?