#blessed

Oh little girl, 
my stringbean,
how do you grow?
You grow this way. 
You are too many to eat. 

I hear as in a dream
The conversation of the old wives
Speaking of womanhood. 
I remember that I heard nothing myself. 
I was alone. 
I waited like a target. 

- Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman, Anne Sexton

Can the internet make you more grateful? Why not? Can't the internet can make you more everything? 

Recently "being online" has been making me envious, with the things that people were getting to do and getting to be dancing around in my head and taking up more space than they should. It makes me sort of sick to write that, bearing in mind my life, but we all have some of that ugly stuff inside us. Now and again it rears its head and if I don't swat it like a fly it festers and becomes a pattern and grows and grows. 

The way I swat it like a fly is by two simple practices, so ancient and simple that even Google will tell you about them (yes, the Internet can make you more grateful): 1. recognising other people's struggles and 2. counting my blessings. There are myriad different gratitude practices you can look up and do. You might do it as part of meditation or yoga or you might do it when you're going to bed at night or you might do it on the bus in the morning. You might think of all the things in your life that you're grateful for, you might write them down or you might turn them over and over in your mind or you might let them glow inside you or run down your back like water. You might sit with them, holding them as if in your hands and you might breathe into the idea of them. 

You might imagine the sadnesses and disappointments and other sufferings that someone you know has, maybe someone close to you or the impatient bus driver or that sullen rude man at work. You might turn them over and over in your mind, not gleefully but in a way that connects with your empathy and compassion. 

Henry David Thoreau said "envy is ignorance", ignorance of other people's suffering and a lapsed appreciation for everything we have.  When I don't carefully, regularly count the things I have, I spend too much time thinking about the things I don't. Recently it's been my desire for more time to do the things I used to be freer to do. Not less time with my family, just more time in the world. I was so naive during pregnancy that I assumed, because I spent lots of time being at home and watching boxsets anyway, that it wouldn't be hard to adjust to relatively less freedom. I really thought that. 

I didn't understand the longing I would have. (What if I hadn't been able to have a baby? Longing too, one longing I have the luxury not to have to countenance.) Motherhood is nothing if not ambivalent and in the same moment as loving my daughter and loving being in her company, I wish for the things I can't do because I have her, the repeated desires to be able to skip out when I want and immerse myself in every yoga studio in London and every workshop and every retreat to open my heart on a Goan beach and every teacher training in San Francisco and every class I want to teach and every cafe I want to sit in afterwards savouring the experience I've had, with a notebook and with time and energy. Sometimes I'd like to spontaneously nip into a shop as I leave work or go and meet a friend in a bar and drink a cold sharp Margarita or go to Kings Cross and get on the train to Paris. A long night's sleep. A lie-in. But these days this kind of impulsiveness is rarely possible. Some things are potentially possible but everything has a higher cost. 

This is just my shit. The thing I desire could be anything really. Being thankful for what you have isn't about denying your desires, and practicing gratitude won't magically make your desires disappear. They are still there, sometimes valid and trying to tell you something about what you need, sometimes trying to tell you about something you think you need. What it's about is stopping the merry-go-round of envious wishing, what Philip Moffat calls "the endless wants and worries of your life's drama", that must be nipped in the bud if you are not to waste your life. 

When you practice being grateful lots of things come starkly and quickly to light, like all the gifts in your life, like the fact that no one has a life with no restrictions, like a true and genuine happiness for people who deservingly get good things. It is humbling and obvious but sometimes you just cannot see it. 

The internet makes things worse and it makes things better, and yesterday my Instagram feed, that edited content which leaves out the boring and the ugly and the sad, helped me (literally) see all the good and beautiful things in my life. Instagram is an edit but our jealousy and our longing are edits too, zooming in on selected gripes, an unhelpful curation of rubbish. If we let it, our life wish-list would never stop growing. Instead you can gently put the reins on, and turn back slowly to look at yourself - really look at yourself - in the mirror.