Gratitude VS Positive Thinking

It rained on our garage sale.
We got wet in the same way the Titanic took on a bit of water.

Between 5 of us, none of us thought to prepare for the possibility of rain.

We all read the forecasts.
All week the weather warned of clouds, sun and showers.
We thought...
I don't know what we thought.

We thought "rain" meant
a few showers that would pass, get us a little wet then move on.
We figured our stuff would get a little damp but not enough to ruin anything.

We were wrong.

The showers did not pass quickly.
We had torrential downpours mixed with solid sheets of heavy rain
followed by periods of drizzle followed by heavy rain.
Our stuff got soaked, some of it ruined.

We got soaked.
Soaked to the skin, like so wet our underwear had to be wrung out.

One of my girlfriend's shoes were making sloshing noises as she walked.
The whole thing was funny and sad.

In the middle of all this sopping wet commotion
I was semi-helpless on crutches.
I couldn't carry anything.
I couldn't stand long enough or well enough to do much.
My friends had to do most everything for me.
I felt like a burden, a cold, wet helpless burden, sitting like a lump
while my girlfriends did backbreaking work in the middle of Noah's Ark-style rain.

For lunch we sat under a backyard picnic tent (thanks to the resourcefulness of one of the gals and her husband who delivered it in the rain) watching the driveway full of stuff get drenched.
We made the best of it.
Our host fired up a propane grill under the tent and made burgers.
We drank beer and ate while the world dissolved around us.

Our attitudes were good considering the awfulness of our situation.
We joked as the driveway flooded, soaking our stuff , making it unsellable.

The term "rainy season" became something very real to me.
Imagine weeks and weeks where buckets of rain are thrown on you.
Imagine never believing you'll be warm and dry ever again.

I thought of every Vietnam movie where our troops went slogging through the jungle while the air around them turned to water. I thought of that scene in...was it Forrest Gump or Platoon...where one of the soldiers was drying his socks over the fire because he had seen fungus eat a man's foot right off right off his body.

When the whole world is rain there is no place to hide,
no place to get away from the water,
no way to heat up and dry out.

Our New Jersey lawns are sprouting mushrooms in testimony to the rain.

As we tried to have fun, worked and suffered together, my mind puzzled on how to see something good in what we were going through.

My thoughts rattled off great reasons for our rainy debacle.
We needed to learn lessons.
We needed to learn how resourceful we could be.
We needed to learn to make the best of a bad situation.
We needed to learn to keep a positive attitude.
We needed to learn detachment from stuff.
Need need need
learn learn learn
while a voice inside of me
stood firm in it's opinion
that our situation
sucked.

It was a shitty day.
We were disappointed.
Stuff got ruined.

Sure there was plenty of stuff to be positive about.

But there was something not quite complete about finding the "good" in our situation.

I remember my healer saying something to me.
He asked how I was doing
and I answered that I was "trying to find the good in everything".

He told me that sounded contrived.

Finding the good sounded contrived?
I was offended.
I was mad because I really was working very hard to find something positive in every situation.
He said I should not look for the good.
He said I needed to find the God in everything.

I think I get it now.
There were lots of experiences yesterday.
Lots of labels to be put on our situations.
I kept getting stuck in the notion that being grateful for the "good" was somehow better than seeing the "bad".
Like it's morally superior to keep positive in the middle of a shitty situation.
By trying to only see the "good" I was shortchanging the shittiness of things.
God provides everything and then we judge it good, bad or in between.
We're grateful for the good
and so squeamish about the bad that we try to make something positive out of it
when really all if it is ....just is.
There are no good or bad experiences. There are experiences.
We place labels on stuff we like or don't like.

It occurred to me that being GRATEFUL meant being GRATEFUL.
Being grateful is distinct from seeing the "good" in things.
Being grateful means just that: being grateful.
Not to be grateful for hard times cuz they lead to good things but being grateful because stuff is what it is.
The gratitude is for the experience whether or not they earn good/bad labels.

Yesterday was mostly awful.
Yesterday was full of situations, conditions, feelings and experiences that were yucky, awful, unpleasant and undesirable.
Though I didn't like it I'm grateful for it.

I'm grateful for the experience.
I'm not even sure I need to explain WHY I'm grateful.
I'm not going to say "Thank you for my shitty day because it taught me...bla bla bla."

I'm just going to say, "Thank you for my shitty day."

Period.

I can't explain why.
Maybe I don't have to.

*Lisa's Video Pick of the Day*
I'd tell Hal a secret but I don't really have any left, do I?
lol
Here's another installment in The Peep Diaries
(the documentary that I'm going to be in) video blog
from the recent book expo at the Javitz Center in NYC.
click here or click below