This Too, Shall Pass (stay grateful)

I just took one of my very best friends to the airport. She is traveling home to Cincinnati, Ohio…almost two-thousand miles away from me. While I always feel close to her, regardless of where in the world we are, it was nice to have her physically close for a while.

In this picture, I am picking her up at the airport.

As I pulled away from the airport, leaving her behind, my mind went to a Facebook post my brother recently shared:

And it is true. Everything in life passes. Even the good stuff. Case in point, on the same day that my brother shared the post above, I shared this post:

Life lesson: live with gratitude. Take a moment each day to consider the things for which you are grateful before they pass (and even after they pass).

Humans have a tendency to get used to things – it’s called Hedonic Adaptation. It is the tendency to get used to things that make us unhappy (like how you get used to something stinky and barely smell it until you leave and come back). And it is also the tendency to get used to things that make us very happy so that we don’t feel the same level of happiness anymore (like how we get used to a new car and no longer feel as excited to drive it).

The good news is that you don’t have to let hedonic adaption steal your sense of delight or happiness.

At the end of the private road where I live, there is a stop sign as you leave the neighborhood. From this stop sign all you see in front of you is every shade of blue that is the Caribbean Sea. Each day when I leave my house, I sit at this stop sign and gaze at the sea and think about how very grateful I am to live here, and to be so near the sea. After describing this daily ritual to Dean, he admitted that he does this too. This is how we combat hedonic adaptation which threatens to decrease our joy (if you’re interested, here’s an article about this).