Yesterday’s blog encouraged using travel as a means to learning more about yourself as well as other countries, drawing on inspiration from the release of the movie this week of Eat Pray Love. The movie has taken some heat for being too self-centered. As I recall, the line of one reviewer was, “A little navel-gazing goes a long way.” But many of us have some bad habits that could benefit from navel-gazing, if we actually change those habits. Allow me to return to Tuesday’s cow path analogy in a new way.
I first started using the cow path analogy a couple of years ago when I came across a delightful article called “Loosen Up Your Mind with Gratitude” written by Stephanie West in 2002. (http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2002/04/04/loosen-up-your-mind-with-gratitude) As I did in Tuesday’s blog, she noted the theory that Boston’s roads grew out of cow paths – meandering paths became ruts that became roads. She, too, noted that we have cow paths in our brains that can become ruts. But the ones she referred to were those that come from our negative self-talk – all the things we tell ourselves that are detrimental to our well-being. These ruts may be about our own inadequacies, or the inadequacies of others, about the obstacles we encounter in life or the dreams left by the wayside.
She suggested that if we have such ruts in our brains – and all of us do – we need to purposely rain on our brains to create marvelous mud that will even out the furrows and give us a chance to create new grooves based on gratitude. She didn’t ask that we think about the big broad things we might be grateful for – family, friends, food and a roof over our heads – but at the smallest thing that has happened to us today. It is often the little moments that make a difference in our days, but we tend to ignore the gifts they represent.
Ms. West suggested that we think about something of no particular importance, and to rewrite it in our minds as a moment of gratitude, a moment worth remembering. When I was at a low point in my days caring for my parents at the end of their lives, I was sometimes enormously and irrationally cheered by a stranger I met going the opposite direction on a walking trail near my home. The stranger usually said no more than “Hi,” but it was an acknowledgment that I was not invisible and it was often the kindest word I heard that day. It sounds ridiculous, but I assure you, you can’t imagine the effect your cheering words might have on another person.
But receiving kind words with gratitude is as important as giving them to others. Gratitude, Ms. West reminds us, makes new freeways of thinking gently possible. It welcomes positive energy. It allows you to sing in the rain. And as the years go on, it helps you change those rut-laden cow paths into health highways and love lanes and self-expressways.
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