Guys, this is going to sound like such a trite phrase, especially since Thanksgiving has come and gone. But I don’t think that human beings are particularly good at being grateful.
Of course, there’s evolutionary reasons for this — if you ate a poisonous plant once and almost died, it’s really important that you remember what the plant looked like. But the memories of eating all the pleasant, non-poisonous plants? Eh. Whatever.
What this translates into in our current, non-plant-foraging lives (or at least, I don’t forage for plants… I wait in long lines at Trader Joes) is that for every negative experience that we have, we need three to five positive experiences to offset one negative experience. We also forget negative experiences more slowly and think about them more often, and — get this — we perceive people who say negative things as more intelligent than people who say positive things.
Tldr: We’re not hardwired to be happy. We’re not hardwired to be grateful. We’re hardwired to survive.
Kinda bleak, isn’t it?
The good news is that it’s not our fault that we evolved this way. But while it may not be my fault, I genuinely want to be happy, so I have to reckon with my negative mind regardless. And one of the best ways I know how to do this is with gratitude.
So today, I thought I’d list some things that I really, truly enjoyed this weekend. I love doing this on a blog, because it’s so much fun to revisit. Having an online record of positive moments is like having a little snow globe of happy things that you can take out and look at whenever you want.
With no further ado and in no particular order, here are some things I feel particularly grateful for this weekend:
This Saturday, it snowed for the first time all year. I love snow so much, possibly because it makes me feel like the world has become one big stage for the Waltz of the Snowflakes in the Nutcracker. When I woke up, I just stared out my window for a solid fifteen minutes, watching the snowflakes. And it snowed all day! It felt so cozy.
I got to know a friend much better. I’ve known her for a while, but we became a lot closer this weekend when we spent an evening that was supposed to just be us watching a Ghibli movie and eating popcorn and drinking wine. The popcorn was eaten and the wine was drank, but we never got around to the movie — instead we talked until 3:00am without realizing it, and I have a much stronger friendship with her than I did before.
I had brunch with two friends who I hadn’t seen in a while, and we laughed incredibly hard over dim sum. I am deeply grateful for pan-fried noodles, pan-friend pork dumplings, soup dumplings, shrimp rice dumplings, scallion pancakes, red bean dumplings, and the fact that one of my friends told me to put vinegar on the dumplings instead of soy sauce. The world of dumplings will never be the same.
I found out that a bubble tea place I’d been dying to try has the option of substituting soy milk for real milk in their drinks, which is a blessing to lactose-intolerant but bubble-tea-obsessed creatures such as myself. Also earl gray tea lattes are a thing of beauty, particularly when you’re waiting in the cold to get into a dim sum restaurant.
All the snow has stayed on the tree branches, and it’s beautiful.
I went to the library, and I found out that they a) have a new cafe that sells excellent brownies and b) they were having an exhibition on the Nutcracker and c) they had the book I wanted. Libraries are the best.
With gratitude,
Mara
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