There’s a moment, maybe halfway up a hill when your breath finally starts to match your stride and the tight coil of noise that’s been looping in your head begins to dissolve, not because you figured anything out or reached some big revelation, but simply because you’ve moved your body into a different space and nature, without asking, has moved in to take the edge off.
You don’t have to plan a weekend away or pay for a retreat in the mountains to get there, sometimes all it takes is stepping outside, standing still long enough to let your senses catch up, or even just pulling up a picture, a wide field, a tree line, something quiet with light stretched across it just right, and sitting with it until the rest of you follows.
Gratitude works in a similar way, in that it doesn’t need to be loud or visible to count, it could be something as small as remembering the person who made time for you on a bad day or saying thank you, even if it’s only in your head, to the morning for not going entirely off the rails, and sometimes that tiny act of noticing, of acknowledging, is the only thing keeping the whole thing from tipping.
Quick tip: I like to practice gratitude, through imagining the absence of the thing in my life. For example, if trees and plants did not exist, then it would be a very bland glance out my window, and I appreciate that I do not have to endure that reality.
When you bring both of those together, a slice of sky that doesn’t need you to name it and a moment of quiet thanks that no one else hears, you end up with something far more reliable than whatever digital solution promised to calm your mind or fix your mood, because they don’t demand anything from you, they just keep showing up until you remember to.
HOW BEAUTIFUL IS IT:
Hospitals, especially the ones paying attention, have started putting photos of trees or clouds or water into rooms, not as decoration to match the curtains, but as a kind of medicine that slips in through the eyes because the nervous system, in all its complexity, responds even when it knows the thing it’s looking at isn’t technically real, it just wants a way out of the loop.
Gratitude, for all its simplicity, rewires things too, it changes your sleep, your blood pressure, the weight of your heart and sometimes the tightness of your chest, not through force but through steady reminders that you are not alone in this, even when it feels that way.
Not everything has to run efficiently to be meaningful, you can tell the same story twice, you can walk the same path every day and still find something new in it, you can say thank you again and again to the same person, not because you forgot you already did, but because it still matters, and sometimes doing it again is how you know it stuck.
So if today felt too loud or too fast or like you missed the part where you were supposed to catch your breath, maybe try stopping, even for a minute, and let your eyes land on something still and living that doesn’t need anything from you, and let a memory or a name drift in, one that still holds weight, and just notice it, no action required.
This isn’t a tactic or a system or something to optimize, it’s just a passing thought, a nudge really, from someone else who’s still learning how to be here too.
Good luck.