Some things are easy to be grateful for, and obvious. My health, for example.

My knees work. I can breathe. I can swim and walk and run. My eyesight and hearing are good.

I seem to be in decent working order, for now. 

My sense of gratitude is shifting with age. I’m grateful for different things than I was a few years ago.

It makes life simpler, as the end times start to come into focus, and as my own mother comes around the final corner of life’s track.

My father, may he rest in peace, has already moved, two decades ago. 

I’m in middle-age. I live in the middle ages!

Cancer, depression and a loss of purpose seem common around me.

In fact, loss is endemic. Children leaving. Choices narrowing.

Financially, I have been leaking value for a long time, but luckily some good decisions made earlier in life have made a difference.

I’m grateful I can pay the rent, even if it is often stressful. The stress gives it some meaning. 

My gratitude has shifted to relationships, even as many vital ones from earlier in life have shrivelled and dried up.

I’ve worked hard to maintain some of them, although work is perhaps not the right word to use.

It’s been a pleasure to care about people I care about. They will accompany me into the thin times of my later years, inshallah. I have read that the number one regret of the dying is that people did not keep up with old friends. 

Gratitude peppers everything now. It saturates things on an almost molecular level.

It is unconstrained and occasionally unfocussed, undirected.

It determines a state of being more aligned to bliss and serenity than simply informing any one fleeting thing. I still sometimes make a list to remind myself. 

I’m grateful for it all. For the good and the bad, for hardship and ease.

For the challenging, provocative and pain-inducing behaviour of someone in my family, and for the massive pain I sit alongside in my work as a grief counsellor.

Even death brings some kind of sweetness to life, although it might not be apparent at first. It certainly brings other things too, like an immense numbing sadness.

But it would be foolish of me to be grateful only for the obvious things, as if I could separate my emotions.

They’re always mixed, a play of light and shade. 

I used to take my life for granted. In my days of active addiction, life was cheap.

I put myself into dangerous situations without a thought. Near-death experiences I imagined might sober me up and make me grateful. They didn’t.

I’ve realised, with some shame, and I’ve found it difficult to come to peace with, that I have been unconscious for most of my life.

Many of the things I did had little meaning. I would have behaved differently if I knew then what I know now. It’s easy to say with hindsight.

So perhaps it’s not true that I would have done things differently. Free will is an illusion. We do what we did with what we had and knew at the time. I forgive myself for the past.  

I’ve changed my relationship with myself.

This is the thing I’m most grateful for.

I accept myself now, most of the time. Often, it’s still not very far I have to travel to find my own worst enemy.

But I can simply be with myself now. It’s okay to be me. Before, this was intolerable.

I went to great lengths to avoid myself, and hurt myself, punish myself even. For what imagined crime, I wonder? 

So I am glad too, and grateful for this dark period, for the blinding forge and the dark swampland I laboured through. A lifetime’s journey.

It has made me who I am today. Someone who can help others, and is not simply wrapped up in my own pain. 

I don’t have to haul out this gratitude hack and aim it at anything, fire it up again and again, because it has become part of me.

I am living proof of it. In my actions with others, I hope and humbly pray, I may share with others what has been given to me, and so keep it alive within me.