Some time ago, I was having a very bad week.
It was one of those weeks where everything that could go wrong was going wrong consistently and daily and I just couldn’t catch a break.
I got news about the loss of a family member and even though we weren’t close, I just needed to be around family but look who’s 2000 kilometres from home. The gbasgbos continued on Thursday and even on Friday.
The thing with bad things happening is that you can’t exactly pray or wish them away. No one has or going to have experiences full of peaches and roses every single day for the rest of their lives.
We just have to learn to deal with bad experiences in a way that’s beneficial to us and hopefully makes us better humans.
On my trip to Portugal last year, I had dinner with a man who was in a coma for over a month during the early days of the pandemic and was just grateful that he got to lose weight as he wasn’t eating during the comma.
So far, I have found that gratitude and focus are really good strategies for helping me and a lot of other people deal with bad days and weeks.
I have learned about Gratitude in another dimension this year. It used to be just theory for me but now I have a gratitude list I look at and rewrite when I feel like crap.
What makes a bad day or a bad experience even worse is the isolation that comes with it.
Isolation of the situation, Isolation of yourself, Isolation of your thoughts.
Being grateful or practising gratitude by itself doesn’t make the situation better nor does it make the problems go away.
We still need to deal with big, real-life issues like the pandemic, war or bad governance. But life is easier to deal with when you don't feel completely like crap.
There are different ways to practise gratitude like writing what you are grateful for, watching old videos of yourself, reading old gratitude lists or journals, singing, speaking out about what you are grateful for, talking to someone etc
Gratitude allows you to invite positive feeling emotions into your heart so you don’t get totally consumed by the negative. It invites more friendly feelings into the situation so that the negative emotions are not alone. So while you feel it, it’s not the only thing you feel.
Have a great day/month/quarter/year.
Talk to you sometime later 😊
XXX
Yewande.