Headwinds and Tailwinds Pt.2
There are many direct benefits of being grateful…gratitude can be powerful as long as we can remind ourselves of its presence in our lives. However we can be blind to what we are truly grateful for. In my situation, I lost sight of how grateful I felt to be walking the PCT with two of what would become, my closest friends. I wasn’t taking in that I was in the midst of a positive life changing experience despite the inclement weather. All of this in that moment was invisible to me. In a more general way I was not ‘seeing’ the opportunities this experience was giving me to learn about myself. I was not seeing the joy of even being alive, the fact we were free to move about in nature or talk freely and openly. These were all things to feel grateful about.
Interestingly we don’t chase gratitude. We tend to highlight the experiences that are readily available in our memories. These often are headwinds rather than tailwinds. We have to pay attention to the barriers in front of us because we have to get over or through them in some way. We must overcome them. We can take for granted the things boosting us along. That fundamental asymmetry in attention is the headwinds/tailwind asymmetry.
We often find it is easier to summon the feelings that are opposite of gratitude. In fact, they are the enemies of gratitude. Through habit or adaptation: we think if some good thing comes our way we will be forever happy and grateful. We won’t have to sweat the small stuff anymore. However when we adapt to it, all of a sudden we are sweating the small stuff again. In my experience I got in the habit and felt grateful to wake up to sunshine every morning until I didn’t. I was sweating more than the next mile. I was wondering, why did I put myself in this situation? Am I really having fun? What was I thinking when I agreed to hike the PCT?
Other detractors of gratitude are greed and envy. Greed suggests to us that we don’t have enough. There are just not enough sunny and nice days. This is not a means to an end. Having is the end. As I experienced the wet/cold days it was so hard to appreciate what I had experienced when it was dry.
Envy is focusing on whatever people have. My envy was the attitudes of Jim and Rees. They were able to move forward. When we feel either benign envy or malicious envy our gratitude goes out the ‘window’. My benign envy dogged me and only made the ‘bad days’ worse. This made me wonder how Jim and Rees were appearing so impervious to the weather conditions and I was not.
When we explore what our own headwinds and tailwinds are then we can discover that headwinds are a mix of more concrete things such as other people getting in my way and inanimate things such as procedures, bureaucracies, and structural things. In my case part of the headwind I was facing the positive nature of my partners and the foul weather.
When the researchers looked at tailwinds people are aware of, they tend to notice way disproportionately the intervention of other people. As that highlights what we are or could be grateful about. However if you remind folks how lucky they are, they don’t like that. We guard against it. But if you ask, “How has luck played a role in your life?” People will get in touch with their tailwinds, or how lucky they are.This is a bit of reverse psychology but honestly, I don’t believe luck has anything to do with anything. I was fortunate to have Jim and Rees as partners and friends. I would not have made it to Rainy Pass without them.
If you are running out of energy ask yourself, “What are my tailwinds?” Not what am I grateful about? ”What is boosting me along, what are the invisible things that make my life easier.” Focusing on those and different things may come up. They sure did for me. If you would like to share some of your tailwinds and headwinds we would sure like to hear from you at the PCTTrailsidereader.com
