003 - Freedom > Fear
This past month has been an unraveling of gratitude.
So sometime late last year/early this year, my good friend Kayla recommended this book to me called A Curious Year in the Great Vivarium Experiment by Tim Shields. In this book, Shields’ explores the power of gratitude, intention, and letting go of life’s expectations through his travels abroad. In particular, the former two powers are documented through his daily journal, which includes five things he is grateful for and five things that he intends to create.
To say that Kay was instrumental to me beginning to write again, even in this brief way, is an understatement. The prospect of writing for “fun” was (and is) terrifying, but this innovation in self-exploration felt just scary enough to keep me intrigued in developing this new writing entity -- and my Self through acknowledging the good and potential for good. Thus, I hopped on the gratitude train sometime in February, continued mainly through April, then in late May I began consistently writing in it again to the present.
As ACE has continued on, a repetition in my gratitude journal is how thankful I am to be in an organization that challenges me and grants me such incredible opportunities. So when I found out that I was being sent on a month-long hitch to Washington state at the end of July, it felt like my conscious gratitude had manifested into my physical reality. I am in thick pine forest, temperate rainforest, within the clouds on (seemingly) the top of a mountain (which, realistically, is only at like 6200 elevation so I’m unsure if it’d be a mountain, but you try climbing 2.5 miles uphill on day four of hitch and see what you’d describe it as. Mountain goats live where we are working, so I consider it to be as such). This is a dream.
Most of all, this is fulfilling because of the consistency. Consistency is something I’ve always struggled with, but the ability to sit down and reflect over where your heart feels drawn to in life is now my favorite grounding exercise.
So hey! Challenge yourself! Write down your gratitude and intentions, then do it again the next day, and see where it takes you. Some days are still gonna suck and things still wont always work out the way you want. Sure. But the defining practice will change you for the better. Believe it. Gratitude can set you free from the fear of not knowing what might happen next.
