The Zinger Comes Back Around

Today I am grateful for my counseling colleagues at the school we work at together. We are a diverse group in personality and philosophy, which seems to work for us.

I am also grateful for the soft fur on our dog Oliver and my working sense of touch. It relaxes me just to give him a nice belly or back rub, and he sure seems to like it too. I never understood "A dog is a person's best friend" until I fell in love with Oliver, just hours after meeting him.

As I approach my 100th blog post (today is #99), I need to revisit the zinger I threw out in the first days of this blog (Monday, April 2 to be exact.)  Gratitude is powerful in a multitude of ways, but one of the best things it does is keep self-pity at bay. I  have heard self-pity referred to as "bitter morass."

That sure fits. Something that is harsh and disagreeable, while trapping, hindering or impeding. Why would I have wanted to be stuck in that?  It was all I knew. I beat myself up pretty good for several years with negative self-talk. And when I was thinking and feeling that bitter morass, what people said and did around me got interpreted by a dark and down mind. No wonder I wanted to keep drinking alcohol. It numbed the pain of what was my reality.

The good news is that gratitude can help change a person's reality. Not in the sense that the world changed, but that my way of viewing the world changed. From dark and down to hope and periods of joy.

The zinger is that it is not possible to be grateful and feel sorry for myself at the same time. If I choose gratitude, hope and joy follow. If I choose self-pity, the bitter morass pulls me in further.

Today I choose gratitude.

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