Thank You for the Happiest Day of My Life

?

He has made everything beautiful?and?appropriate in its time. He has also planted eternity [a sense of divine purpose] in the human heart [a mysterious longing which nothing under the sun can satisfy.) - Ecclesiastes 3:11

This week, I am grateful for good health. I had terrible sleep patterns last week and laid awake for long hours on my bed. I felt weak on many days and struggled to do my work and write my thesis. But looking back, I completed most of the goals I wanted to reach and made a milestone in my work portfolio. Some days were better than others, so I am grateful for having very few good days that counted so much in spite of the inconvenience. -From my diary

It is the end of the third month already, and as you can tell, things have fallen to so many scopes beyond our plans and budget. I mean, it does not take a prophet to see this. We live in a very uncertain world. So this time, I hope that you will embrace thanksgiving. For the days when the plan does not go well and for the days when they turn sour. For the days when it goes way better than planned and for the days when it is neither radiant nor grey. Neither dark nor bright. For the grey days especially. These particular moments have many names. Some call it the waiting moment. Others call it the process. But the idea is the same. In that season, nothing is happening.

This is why I wrote this sanity stop. It is obviously not the happiest day of my life and far from it in any way. However, today, I am choosing to follow the logic of Jaymes Young. This weekend, I listened for an ungodly long time to Jaymes' "Happiest Year". I was drawn to the title but got stuck at the lyrics. It was one of the most melancholic songs I have heard. I was curious to know what was going on in his mind when he wrote that song. So I checked the description of the song on his Youtube where he explained why he wrote the song:

?have to admit that "Happiest Year" has always been a deceiving title… The writing began amidst one of the darkest places of my life, in 2018. I was completely in hell. I was lost in deep loneliness, depression, and a sense of regret that I had never experienced before. Time was standing still, and the world was moving by without me, day after day. It was such a disorientating labyrinth of emotions for me, and I was completely turned inside out over the pain I was dealing with…

"Happiest Year" is really about the first year of a relationship, before things went sour. I had family and close longtime friends visit me during that first year, who later expressed concerns over my state of bliss. I don’t think I really wanted to see it, because I was too happy in the moment to consider the possibility that I was perhaps embracing a fairy tale with an uncertain ending. So, it’s actually a pretty backhanded thing for me to say “thank you” like I do in the chorus of the song, because really I’m saying “at least you gave me that first year” haha. There’s both spite and gratitude in that phrase."

?

What stuck for me in Jayme's explanation of why he wrote "Happiest Year" was the last sentence that 'there is both spite and gratitude in those lyrics.' Gratitude does not have to come from a place of fulfilment and satisfaction. Sometimes, it comes from a place of seeing whatever little light remains with us when the darkness chooses to stay. The other thing he said in the description was that even though he isolated himself from everyone for months, it was not more than 10 days after he started writing and recording the song that he drove himself to the hospital seeking professional help. I think this is what gratitude does. It pushes us to hope and faith, which are human essentials.

Have you ever had the feeling that you had a really bad year? Then, fortunately enough, you kept a diary and went through every entry. Every wish you had as the year was starting out, frustrations of not meeting goals, near depression for when things got slow, a sense of wanting to give up when it looked like nothing was coming. A joyful exclamation when you got that one thing right. This experience cheers me up no matter how I am feeling. It gives me the picture of my year and helps me appreciate every turn.

Gratitude is for every day, especially for the bad days and the days when nothing is happening. Gratitude puts us in the place of humility and makes us appreciate life as a whole - its processes. It stops us at our limits as humans. But it also gives us hope to look further into the future and continue our work.

It can get rather easy to complain a lot and let the tiny miracles of living escape our grasp. In fact, the odd thing is, it is even easy to watch the big highlight slide away without counting it for the miracle that it once looked like in our books of expectations and dreams. Man has eternity in his heart, and the idea of moving to the next thing could really deny us the moment of gratitude for what already is.

So I guess what I am saying is that if you want to practice gratitude, then you need to slow down and reflect about how you are spending every day of your God-given life. You can practice reflection by keeping a journal if you fancy one. You can also take a few minutes every day before you sleep or as you wake to reflect on the past day, and that one thing you felt grateful for. Gratitude is an arsenal you need in your weapon of warfare. The hardest war to win is the war against ourselves and our emotions. In my opinion, I think gratitude gives us a better mindset to do our best work.