Radical Love & Gratitude
Radical love & radical gratitude for everything is a tough concept to understand.
We can’t possibly love and be grateful for everything that happens to us. Sure, we can love and be grateful for the good things in life, but it’s difficult to love and be grateful for every minor annoyance, for unsavory people, for difficult times, for traumatic experiences, for extreme hardships. And maybe we don’t have to. Not everything needs to have a positive spin on it. Sometimes shit is just bad.
Or can it be more?
In the thought exercise of radical love and gratitude, we might be able to radically accept things, situations, events, and people, and see things for what they plainly are. And through it, to see ourselves in the process as a totally separate and detached being from all of these. That we have our own reality, and our own person, and we are our own individual and it need not be consumed by everything else around us.
That through radical love and gratitude for everything, we might radically love ourselves and be grateful for our own lives, no matter what has happened in the past, what is happening in the present, and what might happen in the future.
To radically love and be grateful for all the things we don’t want to do, for people we encounter that we would rather wish to not be in our lives, for difficult challenges that send us to our brink. That it might be through these things that we can hope to find the things that we do want to do, find people we would love to spend time with, and find who we really are and what we are made of in our heart of hearts.
When there seems like there’s nothing to love and be grateful for, it challenges us to look around—literally look around—to your left, to your right, to your up, to your down, to breathe the air around you, the see the sights around you, to smell the smells around you, to hear the things around you.
To laugh at the absurdity of life and existence, to smile at all its pains and wonders, to cry at its surrealness and beauty. To absorb all of it, and be mesmerized by your very presence within it, as you play your own unique part in the vastness and history of the entire universe, without judgment, nor regret, nor attachment. Just as you are this very moment, you have already altered the shape of history and the depths of time.
It might be difficult to radically love and be grateful for everything. But through this exercise is how we remind ourselves of the radical love and gratitude we can give for ourselves, if no one else.
You are not just a human being. You are a moment in time, an entity as grand and as complex as any star floating in space. You are a miracle, you are here, and you belong.
December 30, 2022