Honestly, I’m Grateful

24 Days of Grateful [Day 6]

Today, I am grateful for people who are honest. I think we all need someone in our life who isn’t afraid to remind us of our faults, someone who is comfortable with saying, “You made a bad decision here.” Or, “You were being a jerk.”

 We’ve all got piles of dirty laundry that we would prefer to leave unfolded in the closet — balled up, stinking, and ignored. The wrinkled qualities about ourselves that we would rather forget about. And, if I’m being honest, I often do forget about the qualities of myself that I dislike. It is easy to do that when you are caught up in the daily hustle of making breakfast and parking the car and sitting at a computer. Suddenly, waking hours become about what we are doing instead of who we are. The verb isn’t all that special at the end of the day.

At night, when we are sitting in bed, we often think about what we did during the day. Or failed to do, or wished to do, or tried to do. But how often do we think about ourselves in the sense of our qualities as a person? The good stuff weighed with the bad stuff, like putting a rotten apple and a ripe orange on a scale and watching them balance out. I think we all need rotten and ripe qualities — the key is recognizing them both.

I am not good at doing that. There are some days when I see myself more rotten than ripe — and more days during which I am hopelessly disillusioned into believing I am nothing but sweet.

What is the balance? How do we find it in ourselves? Do we need to in order to grow as a person, like picking an avocado at the grocery store?

Trying to choose fruit at the grocery store is a lot of pretending you know what you are looking for. I don’t even know what I’m looking for when I criticize or don’t criticize myself — I just know I’m doing a lot of talking about myself, and maybe that is the problem. It is easy to blind when you are only looking from one place.

Honestly, I’m grateful for people in my life who are looking from other places, and seeing rotten things I can’t. Because if you are always shopping for fruit and don’t really know what you are looking for, it is easy to buy the wrong kind. Thankfully, there are some people who do know what they are looking for when they look at you.