Practicing radical gratitude

Looking back as the academic year ends

Photo courtesy of Ann H/Pexels

I am sure that this academic year has brought many ups and downs for all of us. We have experienced the full range of human emotional experience, including joy, stress, fear, serenity, grief, anxiety, and love. You might have been challenged academically, socially, mentally, or physically. You—in the structure of the question asked at every Lamron meeting—have likely had some one out of five days alongside your five out of five ones. 

The end of the academic year provides an opportunity for reflection; it gives us time (maybe not much during finals season) to review the ways in which we and our lives have changed. For seniors, this might even mean looking back on the entirety of their college career; maybe their major changed, their friend group shifted entirely, or their identity evolved. 

I encourage this practice of self-reflection, and with it, I encourage you to adopt a framework of radical gratitude. In my personal reflections, I have integrated this attitude, meaning that I am grateful for everything within the past year—even the things that I desperately wished would end while they were happening. Every moment, including the seemingly negative or the mundane, is meaningful to me, and not only—but certainly at least partially—for the growth they have induced in the long run. 

When you integrate this framework of radical gratitude, you are able to wake up already grateful simply for that first step of waking up. You can move through life taking moments to appreciate everything, including what happens and what has always been there; you are grateful for the bed you lie in, the clothes you put on, the walk you take to class. You are grateful even for dinner from Letchworth dining hall, and for failing that exam you spent hours studying for. In a broader sense, looking back on this year, you might be grateful for that painful break-up you experienced, that class you didn’t do as well in, the friends you grew apart from, the winter that you prayed every day would soon come to an end. 

Each of these moments, these processes, played a role in making you who you are today. And even if they didn’t play a major role, or if you cannot see the role they played at all, I hope you can recognize their value regardless; they are valuable simply in that they are—simply in that they happened. To experience anything at all is a gift. It can be incredibly difficult to recognize that in the moment, which is why I think these opportunities for reflective retrospection are so important. If you can realize how even the negative experiences of the last year were worthwhile, the negative experiences of your current day-to-day life become less mentally difficult as well.  

Radical gratitude can also shape the way you view change. Change—in a broad sense and in our personal lives—is inevitable. Every day, even if you do not realize it, you and your environment are in a process of change, involving both loss and gain. When you adopt an attitude of radical gratitude, that inevitable change is no longer as scary in the lead-up nor as potentially devastating in the aftermath. The change begins to feel more like the change of the seasons: natural, sometimes painful, but ultimately necessary. 

I am grateful for this academic year and all the change it has brought— the loss and the growth, the pain and the gain. I hope that we can begin to collectively take advantage of and appreciate the opportunity to reflect on the past year with gratitude, and, further, that we might begin to experience that gratitude in the present moment with all of the challenges and joys it brings.