The Quiet Kind of Grateful
There is a teacher I once heard say something I have never forgotten. "The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long." He wasn't talking about ambition. He was talking about joy. About what happens when we take something sacred and make it loud. Gratitude is one of those things. I have watched people, myself included, discover gratitude and immediately turn it into a performance. The lists, the declarations, the daily posts, the morning rituals announced to everyone within reach. And I understand it completely, because when something finally fills a space that was empty for a long time, your first instinct is to hold it up to the light and say — look, look, look. But here is what I have come to understand after sitting with this for a long time. When gratitude gets loud, it is rarely because we are overflowing. It is because we are afraid. Afraid that if we stop counting it, naming it, declaring it : it will quietly leave. So we grip it tighter. We say it loud...