More often than not, when I sit down to write my Friday gratitude post, it turns into a list of complaints. I just start writing about all the difficult and annoying things that happened during the week. The aches. The pains. The exhaustion. The list of things I didn’t accomplish. All of this flows out onto the page with such ease and I will have whole paragraphs of complaints written before I even realize that I’m complaining. Then, I’ll sit back and really read what I wrote and I will select all and hit ‘delete’. It’s not that I don’t feel like I have a right to complain. We all have complaints. Complaints are valid. It’s just that there is something therapeutic about writing it all down and then destroying it.

In a way, this whole process of writing is like cleaning out a closet. I’m getting rid of all the things that I don’t need and leaving behind the good stuff. But I am also making space for extra goodness. A few weeks ago, we received our Gene Keys for Self Care Circle. I have no idea how my gene keys were determined. It has something to do where and when I was born and the website descriptions make me roll my eyes real hard, but the results that came back to me are not untrue. In fact, there is so much not untrue things in my results that I have struggled to read them all completely, but I am going to share with you a few things that really stood out for me.

In the section on what keeps me healthy, it says that one of the most important factors in my well being and longevity is my ability to laugh. When I read this, I thought about last year’s October camp and how much laughing I did. At the end of camp, we went around the circle sharing what we got out of that camp. One woman said that she didn’t come to camp thinking she would end up laughing so much and I looked over to see Amani poking a finger at me, outing me as one of the causes of all the laughter. And it was all true. Last October, I rediscovered my laugh and my ability to see the humor in the ridiculous. This is important because the next thing my gene key says is that “life for you is about finding lightness and humor, especially in difficult or challenging circumstances”.

Shut.

Up.

Sometimes it takes me writing paragraphs of complaints and then deleting them in order for me to make space for finding the lightness and the humor under any circumstances. Especially in difficult and challenging ones.