Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: gratitude movement

  • some delightful stranger

    Some delightful person left a little note in our letterbox this week, thanking us for something we had not done.

    It is wrapped in a glossy little gift box hot pink with white polka dots, which folds open like a Chinese takeaway. There’s something so satisfying about those boxes. Inside is a mess of silver glitter, a note, and half a dozen transfers which are intended as play tattoos. One says, backwards:

    We accept
    the love
    we think
    we des
    erve.

    Another has a Day of the Dead skull drawn on it with flowers round the bone. The note, when I unfolded it, read:

    “Thank you for being so kind this morning when I parked in front of your house. I was running late & had nowhere else to park, your kindness was appreciated! Have some temporary tattoos for your kids!”

    It is a strange feeling to be thanked for someone else’s kindness. But I loved it. I wish I could get hold of this stranger and put them in touch with their real recipient. Only as I write does it dawn on me the obvious thing to do will be box it all up again, glitter and all, and deliver it to my lovely neighbour, who likely is the real fairy godfather. It is such a lovely sensation to open the crackling box, spill glitter on my toes, read the cutely lettered note and know that some person did some other person a small, meaningful favour and that other person noticed and appreciated it, and has gone to some trouble to thank them.

  • so much spoilt

    It’s very nice to “take time every day to think through your day and see if there’s anything you can be genuinely grateful for”. But such advice also makes me a little sick. Why don’t our social-media lists of “today I am grateful for…” start with breathable air (thank you, Shanghai), clean running water (thank you, Sahara), and supermarkets overflowing with foodstuffs? How numb do you have to be before it requires a deliberate hunt through your day to see “if there’s anything” you can be glad of? If there’s anything? Anything? How slowly and creakingly does this process have to run before it will effect an actual change in our over-consuming, greedy, wasteful, polluting and entitled habits? We are wrecking our globe. Very fast. Not just for us but also for the people who have no clean running water and for the children of the children who work in toxic factories making our iPhones. There is no point blaming ourselves for the lassitude and ennui, the misery of depression and anxiety that too much meaningless abundance and a dearth of social connection and life’s meaning inevitably creates. I get that reminding ourselves to be grateful is a huge improvement on whinging and complaining, like the woman on the home renovations TV show who wailed when her house was passed in at auction This Is the Worst Thing That’s Ever Happened In My Entire Life!!! But I want us to change faster and wake up more thoroughly. And glib phrasings like this one on Upworthy “Add #365Grateful to your Instagram photos and instantly be part of the gratitude movement!” make me feel ashamed. How bleak would that sentence feel to a hungry person, a person without land or a roof, someone who’s living out their adulthood in an endless refugee camp that stretches in tents as far as the sandy horizon. How they must wish that people who have enough disposable income to give each other cards and presents on so many occasions annually that two weeks from Christmas we are already complaining about Valentines and Easter merchandise in the shops ~ ~ ~ would be more than grateful.