I've sort of decided (that's not the same as "committed")  to do the Gratitude Challenge.

I would have committed, but in order to do so I'm supposed to print out the contract and sign it, and I don't have a printer. Which means I'm starting off the Gratitude Challenge by saying what I don't have, which is probably a bad omen - but saying that, itself, is sorta contrary to the spirit of the thing : )

Today is the first day, in which I'm supposed to "Express why you accepted this challenge and what you hope to achieve from it."

I'm not sure that I hope to achieve anything - I'm not much of an achiever.

                 


This is a bowl with a bit of chili residue on the surface - of course, you could choose to see it as an EMPTY bowl, or you can choose to see it as evidence of a full stomach : )

Ethel made chili last week, before we left for Pinetop, and then she left a bit of it in the fridge; when we returned last night, she was heating up some newer chili, and I asked her if she wanted to add in this older chili. She said no - she thought that this chili was too old.

I don't buy that - I tend to think that there is a natural law of some sort that states that chili tastes better the older it is, right up until it is inedible. If this law didn't exist, it does now, and shall be known henceforth as Puckett's Law. Thus, today's lunch was last week's chili.

When I look at that pair of questions - "why did I accept this challenge" and "what do I hope to achieve", I think about this bowl of chili.

I accepted this challenge for the same reason that I ate this chili - because it was there before me, and looked tasty. I've known for a long time that gratitude is an attitude, and it is one that I can choose, or choose not, to assume. My main problem with gratitude is that I find it scary, because sometimes it can turn and bite me - I find out that something that I was "grateful" for turns out to be a liability, rather than an asset - just like week-old chili.

My friend The Annie Wynn (I would put a link to her blog here, but it won't let me in anymore) mentioned this challenge on Facebook, and so I clicked over there and took a look at it. I'll do like I did with the chili - I'll go through the motions and warm it up and take a taste - if it starts to smell bad, then I'll dump it. So that's why I'm not really "committed".

Sometimes I feel, well, stupid when I'm practicing gratitude - as though I'm afraid that acting grateful will make me seem simple-minded. That goes back to the old question about "would you rather be right, or happy?"

As to what I hope to achieve - (well, for one thing, I'd like to learn how to spell "achieve" without feeling like I"m going to be slapped with a ruler...) - what do I hope to achieve by taking this challenge?

I'd like to lose my fear.

That chili could have been bad - it smelled okay to me, but then, so did Arizona, and look how that turned out?

Ever since I moved to Arizona, I've been terrified. This is because I don't know why I moved here - why God let me move here, or why I wasn't listening to Him and moved here anyway. Since I moved to Arizona, I've been terrified by that very decision-making dilemma; for twenty years, every decision I made (of any size) turned out well for me and mine - usually in the short run, but always in the long run.

However, for the last almost-five-years, I've been sitting in the cesspool of awareness that I made a really bad decision in moving here, and that I've made a bunch more bad decisions (bad, but not of the same magnitude) since I moved here. So now I find that I'm unable to make any real decisions about anything - because my decisions would be bad.

This has caused me to tend to put decisions that I'm forced to make into "regret analysis" - i.e. "If I do this, then what will I be regretting later?" rather than approaching things with a "Gee, that might be fun" attitude.

The other day, a friend of mine who is in management at GoDaddy was asking me about going back into development (I'm always a developer, but nowadays I'm not developing production code - I write programs that test other programs. Fun, but not the same sort of thing, and it doesn't stretch my design or architecture skills).

I realized that I found the idea inviting, but immediately I came up with all of the reasons why it might be bad - all of the things that will happen that will cause me, later on, to regret having made such a decision. This is sort of the opposite of "gratitude" - of seeing the brighter side. I immediately look for the darker side - the threat side - the events lurking in the shadows.

If I had had such a mindset in 2005, I would not - I believe - now be living in Arizona. However, if I were still in Utah, then I wouldn't have this mindset, because it came as a result of moving to Arizona. So I couldn't have learned this lesson without coming here - which makes it the only real candidate answer for the important question "what was the lesson I was supposed to learn from making this mistake?"

So the "lesson", if such it is, is one that continually causes me to be unhappy  - so I hope that that's not the lesson. However,that's the lesson that my belly learned - my brain is unable to overcome my bellyometer's forbodings, and the few times that I have done so, it has turned out that my bellyometer has been right.

So now I live in a world of anti-gratitude - of "looking on the dark side" as a means to evaluate threat, rather than "looking on the brighter side" as a means of opening myself up to possibilities.

And I say that as "what I would like to achieve" - but even as I write this, I realize that doing so might only cause me more trouble, since my experience has shown me that the buzzards sitting on my bedpost keep turning out to be correct - the raven cawing "Nevermore!" keeps turning out to be the voice that I should have listened to.


So a decision to follow through with this Gratitude Challenge might be a decision to cause myself more troubles down the road, since I'll start believing, again, that things might turn out all right, and then I'll make decisions again, and they'll turn out wrong.

So you can see why I'm not yet ready to "commit" : )

And I can't take the Challenge, actually, WITHOUT committing. So that's a catch-22.

But maybe - just maybe - being able to see the brighter side might allow me to actually see things about all of these bad decisions so that they don't look so bad; maybe they'd turn out, in a better light, to have worked out okay. And maybe that is the truth, strange as it may seem.

Maybe I'd be able to see that things are actually just fine the way that they are. Maybe I'll be able to see that things are really GREAT!

..and maybe that's a retreat from reality into psychotic, delusional thinking...

...see why I'm not ready to commit? : )