Finding Joy In Gridlock Traffic

by Karen Krakower Kaplan


Gratitude is the gentle recognition, rediscovery or "re-remembering" of the simple abundance around you.

It is to be a child again, in awe of a purple crayon.

It is sprinting from your car to the office and stopping your jangled thoughts just long enough to savor the sight of someone holding the elevator door for you, someone you do not even know.

Gratitude is noticing the extraordinary in the ordinary. And then taking the nanosecond to feel it.

But in this adrenaline-driven, multi-tasking frenzy we call Life, how do we have time to stop and smell the roses when we don't even have time to stop for gas?

Easy...

1. Just stop.
To access a sense of wonder, every hour or so, just stop. Just for a moment. Take a breath, wherever you are, and step out of your raging river of thought and look around. Notice the photograph hanging in your cubicle that you put up months ago, but haven't noticed since. Look at each face and recall the one thing about them you couldn't live without. "Re-remember" why you hung the photo in the first place.

2. Freeze-frame it.
"Think about someone, something in your life you loved and freeze-frame the picture," says clinical psychologist Blair Justice, Ph.D., professor-emeritus of psychology at the UT School of Public Health at Houston . "The physical effect on the heart [when overlaid by the emotional heart of loving] is what's called cardiac-coherence."

Everything comes into balance when the physical heart and the emotional heart are, say, beating as one.

"A growing body of research supports the notion that rediscovering a sense of abundance by thinking about those people and things we love lowers the risks of coronary events," Justice offers.

3. Create a gratitude journal.
"The gratitude journal assigns us to look for and record the ordinary wonders that come across our paths," Justice explains.

It may take the form of a gratitude list:

an old friend called you today
your kids cleared the table without a fight
a co-worker walked you through a computer snag
At first you may find yourself listing the "at leasts"

at least my kids aren't starving
at least I have a roof over my head
at least I have two legs

Tapping into a sense of abundance doesn't mean that someone else must have it worse for you to feel better about your lot. Nor does it mean that you can't whine when you're stuck in gridlock traffic.

It simply means that since you are stuck in traffic, you might let your mind surrender to the idea of "found time" with yourself, instead of wasted time in traffic. Found time in a gratitude journal might read, "Someone let me into their lane in gridlock traffic. I waved a 'thank you.' They waved back. It felt good."

4. Replace the words 'at least' with 'even if'.
Feeling a sense of emotional wealth comes from a deep, abiding acknowledgement of the present moment. Let's face it: yesterday is gone. Tomorrow, or even tonight isn't here yet. All we have is right now.

In a gratitude journal you might write, " Even if I am stuck in traffic, I have a fabulous new CD, a half-tank of gas and a glorious sunset in my rearview mirror."

5. Change your lens.
Justice suggests that life can be viewed through a different lens, to gain a fresh perspective. First, try on the wide-angle lens: before you define a moment as bad, negative, hurtful, or simply boring, view the situation broadly, both literally and figuratively. Then flip it to the micro-lens to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, or "the sacred in the profane," says Justice.

Say you have an important meeting that you've just found out requires you to walk several buildings over because there's no parking. This is a surprise to you. Now you're crunched for time, not dressed for a hike, unsure how to get there on foot and worried how your laptop is going to make your bad back feel six blocks later..

Put on the macro lens: in the grand scheme

it doesn't really matter if you're five minutes late
the other attendees are walking, too
a comfortable amble will lower your heart rate before this big meeting
and this irritation will be lost to your memory by dinner tonight
and you'll know just how out of shape you've become
and this will be your wake-up call to start walking every day
Flip it to the micro lens: if you zoom up closely

the grounds to the building are stunning
there's a man feeding a squirrel right out of his hand
the sun on your face feels good
your shoes really were a steal, now that you think about it
You enter the meeting relaxed, refreshed and awake

6. The three questions
Justice practices a gentle daily examination. "At the end of the day, I ask myself three questions."

What has surprised me?
What has touched me?
What has inspired me?

He says that "hard-bitten folks have trouble finding beauty or seeing life anew in a daily way, and their arteries and immune system suffer for it." Answering these three questions inspires us to see the stuff of our days through fresh eyes.

Justice tells the story of a burned-out, jaded heart surgeon who attended a workshop on stress reduction. When asked these three questions, "he rolled his eyes, scoffed at the question and answered, 'Nothing, nothing, nothing, respectively.' "

Justice says that the surgeon was told that he was only seeing the human heart through the eyes of a surgeon, and it was time to see the heart through the eyes of a poet or an artist.

"When he returned to the group, he told how he had tried to change his eyes and for the first time in his career, a patient reached out and hugged him. The physician was floored, and forever changed," Justice recalls.

7. Connect your mind to your body
Studies show that journaling-recalling the day's events-both challenging ones and joyous ones, decreases physical symptoms of pain and illness, "and increases our sense of well being," Justice says.

Research also supports that the frequency of appreciation for the small things and the intensity with which we feel gratitude have an exponential growth potential. It creates a benevolent avalanche: the more often you tap into joy, the more joyous you'll feel, the deeper you'll feel it. The body's immune system and cardiovascular system then reap the benefits.

Sensing gratitude is the simplest possible gift we can give to ourselves that yields the highest possible return on our investment. "Letting ourselves feel that sense of wonder that surrounds us every single minute is what elevates our hearts beyond a mechanical pump and turns them into instruments of love and kindness."

This article is posted at http://www.dailygood.org/more.php?n=3641a