Saying "thank you" to hardship

Have you ever been told to say "thank you" for the central hardship in your life? I have. And though I get it intellectually as an important spiritual practice, in the raw emotional moment, I have to admit, the suggestion can sometimes just elude me. I just can't get my head around it.

I first was introduced to this concept of expressing gratitude for what I perceived as the big problem in my life back in my twenties when I was going to AL-ANON regularly. I vividly remember sitting in a folding chair in a church fellowship hall and hearing a member of the group say, "I'm grateful for the alcoholic in my life." At that moment my head swung immediately in the direction of the speaker of those words, and it took everything inside of me to not just blurt out: "are you f-ing kidding me!"

At that time in my life, and with my quite limited experience at that point, approaching life events through anything but a reactive lens was all but impossible. To me, that statement sounded like the most ridiculous thing anybody could say.

And yet, over a decade later, the words stuck. And painfully slowly this concept began to penetrate my very one dimensional view of pain and suffering.

Pema Chodron, I told you I'd be writing about her again, reminds us, "...it's up to you whether you actually experience gratitude and the preciousness of your life, the fleetingness and the rareness of it, or whether you become more resentful and harsh and embittered and feel more and more cheated. It's up to you how [it] all works out."

Oh Pema but that is so hard to do!

I've heard Oprah Winfrey tell a story several times on her shows of when the now deceased Dr Maya Angelou told her, Oprah, to say "thank you" in a moment of suffering or hardship. When Oprah tells the story she kind of mocks herself in how she was whining and woe-is-me-ing to Dr Angelou on the telephone. And Dr Angelou interrupts her and says: "stop and say thank you." What she was saying was to express gratitude in this very moment for the difficulty in your life. Now that is hard core spiritual practice.

So what would that mean for me today?  Well, today I was a grump. So I would have to express gratitude for the challenges of working in a hospital that has cut our department budget to the bear bone. And of having no daycare for my son before and after school because my day care provider got called away on a family emergency.  Admittedly small stuff in the scheme of things. But stuff nonetheless to practice this very challenging spiritual work on.

What difficult aspects of your life could you say "thank you" for today?