Problems. Three things are certain. We all have them. We all don’t want them. We all know that they often get in the way of living a joyful life. But, the reality is – problems are a normal part of life. A part of life that will always be with us. While our problems might bring new hardships to our life every day, consider this, what if…just what if, we chose to be grateful for the challenges our problems bring to us?
Grateful for our problems? What? Are you crazy? That’s simply ridiculous!!! You might be thinking “my problems are way bigger than yours” or “how could I ever be grateful for all of the chaos my problems bring to my life.” Thoughts like this are not unreasonable. In fact, they make perfect sense. Problems are bad. Gratitude is good. They just don’t seem to go together.
In our Facebook community called The Gratitude Spark (feel free to join by the way!), we were recently talking about the definition of gratitude. One of our amazing members from Australia made a great connection between problems we experience and gratitude for those problems.Imagine for a moment that you and your friends decide to write down all of the problems each of you are currently experiencing and you place them in a big pile in the middle of the table. As each of you start to pull out slips of paper that describe a problem someone close to you is experiencing, I suspect a few things would happen. First, you might feel shock, surprise or sadness about some of the things those close to you are going through. Second, I don’t think it would be too long before you would want to put all of those problems back and stick with the ones you wrote – your own problems – and you’d probably be grateful for the opportunity to do so.
That’s the thing with problems. We don’t often talk about them. We tend to keep them hidden. In fact, everyone you meet might be dealing with problems and fighting battles you really know nothing about. Mahatma Gandhi captured this perfectly when he said “I cried because I had no shoes, then I met a man who had no feet.” While your problem might be that you did a poor job on a work assignment, know that there is someone out there that actually has no job. While your problem might be that you aren’t feeling well enough to hang out with your friends, know that there is a child out there that is not feeling well enough to leave the hospital. While your problem might be that your home isn’t as nice as your neighbor’s home, know that there is someone out there that is homeless. It’s all about perspective.
Speaking of perspective, I got a whole bunch of it on a recent walk with my daughter. We were talking about what I was going to write for this article and she said “people always say that we should be grateful for what we have and part of what we have is our problems.” The wisdom and truth behind her words can’t be overstated. We have to own our problems – no matter how big or how small. Some of the slips of paper in that pile of problems on the table are ours. They might not be fun. They might be daunting. But, nonetheless, they are ours.
This leaves us with a choice. We can choose the lens through which we view our problems. We can choose to see our problems as challenges that keep us from a joy-filled life we deserve or, we can choose to see our problems as opportunities when viewed through the lens of gratitude. The beauty is that viewing our problems through this lens will allow us to see them as necessary for incredible personal growth. It will allow us to see our problems as opportunities to push ourselves to new heights. This lens will allow us to address our problems in ways that allow us to become stronger than ever through overcoming the hardships they may bring.
So yes, no doubt the problems in our life can cause chaos and challenges. But, if we take a moment to consider the lessons we can learn from them and the personal growth that can come from them, perhaps it’s not so crazy or ridiculous to be grateful for the problems we experience each day of our life.