This concept of gratitude, you know, we tend to in culture, from my observation, we see gratitude as a type of medicine that we apply to our negative feelings so we don't really think about it unless

we're having a hard time and we use it to go like wow I you know failed here or I'm feeling bad today, but at least I've got X, Y, and Z going for me.

While there's nothing really wrong with that, I feel like just people have been asking about gratitude a lot recently so I've been thinking

about it more and I feel like in some ways that might shortchange the like breadth of what

gratitude has to offer right because if you're only using it to

minimize negativity it's almost in some way a form of toxic positivity where you're like you're not really

embracing the state that you're at like the challenges that you're at, like the challenges that you're at, you're just looking to like

not feel them as much, which that's all right, you know, it's good to bring balance back but the issue is that

then it takes away gratitude on the daily basis and makes it this thing that's only

applied to bring balance to, you know, whenever you're feeling out of whack.

And so what I've been thinking about is kind of drilling down a little bit.

I know it's shocking, but I've been thinking more deeply about this and like how can we look deeper into the root of

what gratitude is why it's useful and so forth and so forth and so I sort of thinking about it. I'm like, all right, well, what's like the root core of a

daily gratitude that I could just tap into in the present moment and stay there with it consistently, right?

And that's for me, I imagine that everyone's experience will vary depending on who they are,

but for me it's just a matter of like the fact that I'm awake that I'm here

in this moment of time and aware of it right now is endlessly mind-blowing to me.

And I can't really ask for much more of that

and all of the good and bad things that happen in life.

Those are all downstream of the fact that we get to experience those

things at all.

So it's quite interesting to consider gratitude from that point of view as opposed to like a salve to be applied to

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