Foreboding Thankfulness

where anxiety meets gratitude

Photo by Autumn Mott Rodeheaver on Unsplash

I awoke uneasy. Several times recently I had actually slept soundly enough to dream and remember what I had dreamed when I woke up, but I couldn’t remember if I had dreamed this night or not. Most likely I hadn’t slept well enough to dream, I certainly felt wrung out and weary, and I couldn’t justify staying in bed any longer. All day I tried to shake off the feeling, but it wouldn’t leave and I couldn’t figure out why. Those times recently when I had slept deeply and dreamed, my dreams had been unsettling to say the least, often downright horrific. I was becoming concerned that my mental health wasn’t doing as well as I thought. Damn. I felt a lot of pressure to be positively golden and glowing after making the shift away from Christianity, as though that might convince my naysayers (most of whom, I’ll admit, live in my brain…though they do sound an awful lot like my parents) that it was justifiably the right decision for me. I reached for the feeling I had experienced the week before, when I had spent the last golden and glowing day of Autumn raking leaves and clearing the last of my garden. The rhythm of the work became a sort of sacred dance, and I felt such a profound gratitude to these plants that I had nurtured from seed and then placed in the care of the good earth, and to the earth herself who had taken over and grown them into a feast of well-being that we had enjoyed for months. “Thank you,” I said aloud to each plant as I pulled it from the ground, and “Rest now, and return to the earth,” as I placed them in my compost. In the back of my mind the last line of my favorite funeral prayer whispered like a benediction: “May the last embrace of the Mother welcome you home¹.” This is living in flow, I had thought. This is balance. This is what spirituality can be when I’m open to it. It had felt like magic.

Like the best kind of dream that day has lingered, inviting me to bask in the remembered afterglow of feeling a part of everything, of feeling worthy to be a part of and partaking in Divinity, even in the simple act of preparing a garden for the winter. I wanted so badly to feel like that all the time. After dinner I told my husband I wasn’t feeling well (which was true) and asked him to take over the girls’ bedtime routine so I could take a bath. Hot water and candlelight usually settle me enough to let whatever is bothering me filter up to the surface, but it didn’t work this time. Neither did the brief and painful yoga routine I have been pushing my tight muscles through every night before bed. Defeated, I gave up trying to untangle my submerged emotions and brushed my teeth. The moment I opened the book I’ve been reading (in every spare moment I can find) my eyes fell on the paragraph I had ended with the night before, and understanding bloomed.

Delight in impermanence. As you solidify your ability to observe changes around you in a way that doesn’t frighten you or make you anxious, it may be important to remind yourself that all things have a season and to find as much joy in the grape hyacinths as they bloom as you do in the photo you posted in your social media account. Delighting in impermanence gives us all a leg-up in dealing with change—which is inevitable, but doesn’t have to be hurtful².

The quote is from H. Byron Ballard’s Seasons of a Magical Life. It doesn’t sound like something ominous or soul-quaking, but that is how I experienced the words both times I read them. Fresh from Samhain and The Day of the Dead, the people I love who are gone continue to linger at the edges of my awareness, like friendly ghosts. I cannot yet think of them and simply be glad that I got to love them at all. I have lost too many people who had their entire lives ahead of them and never got to really live them, or to live, period. To delight in impermanence feels to me like a surrender, like capitulation, like imagining all the living they didn’t get to do and saying to God, “It’s fine, you can take them, you have the right and I can’t stop you and that’s alright by me.”

It’s not fine.

It’s really fucking not.

I guess I had hoped that by changing my perspective of God I could get rid of this conflict, but I haven’t, and my dreams were meant to remind me that the darker side of this life that I’m falling in love with still exists, and it still sucks just as much as it ever did. I am not ready to delight in impermanence, not when having certain people in my life forever would just be so much better.

There is a term that Dr. Brene Brown uses to describe something similar to what I’m feeling: foreboding joy. It is both comforting and disgruntling to know that my particular range of emotions is not unique. I keep turning that phrase over in my head as though tasting it. Foreboding joy, she says, is that fear that comes with love, or with the satisfaction of life going well for a change. You look at someone you love, like your child, and you imagine losing them. You realize that life is good, and you think, “it can’t last.” Joy, says Dr. Brown, is the most vulnerable emotion we experience. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Dr. Brown said: “if you cannot tolerate joy, what you do is you start dress rehearsing tragedy."³ That feeling, that “Oh my gosh, this can’t last” is where I live. I often feel a sort of relief when something terrible does happen, because it lets me stop worrying for a while. And I hate that the thing I want more than anything else, to feel real and lasting joy, is the one thing I cannot tolerate. But, according to Dr. Brown, there is an antidote to foreboding joy: gratitude. The people Dr. Brown came across in her research who had what she called “a profound capacity for joy,” all “practiced gratitude instead of practicing disaster” in those blissful moments of life. And it just so happens that this is the perfect time of year to practice gratitude.