Choosing gratitude
A couple of weeks ago, I posted about shifting perspectives by diving into discomfort and exploring some complicated feelings when I found myself craving the comfort of home.
A couple of weeks later, there have been so many little connections and opportunities to feel more settled here in Japan:
- ✨ great discussions and little language leaps from my Japanese studies and classes
- ✨ meeting three of our next-door neighbors and making plans with them!
- ✨ learning that my local park has Radio Taiso every morning: a short, communal exercise routine open to everyone. One of the neighbors we recently connected with happened to live in Orlando for three years (small world!), and we’ve made tentative plans to go together soon!
- ✨ traveling to incredible summer festivals around Japan, experiencing the culture in new ways, and making memories I know I’ll carry with me forever
- ✨ welcoming friends and family to Shizuoka and showing them around our new second hometown (including friends we’ve known since before they had kids here in Japan. See me holding their baby, then sitting beside that now-15-year-old this past weekend in the video! 🥹✌️)
- ✨ marking the one-year anniversary of another wonderful pair of Japanese teacher friends visiting us in Orlando this time last summer!
So yes; lately, I can’t help but feel grateful.
What a gift to be able to call two countries home. To travel freely. To cultivate friendships that stretch across years, oceans, languages, and cultures. To move my body, eat incredible food, spend time in nature, and feel strong—inside and out—wherever in the world I happen to find myself. To have the love and companionship of a partner who sometimes seems to know me better than I know myself. 🫶
None of those things suddenly became true because I started feeling more at home here; they were already here, even when I was uncomfortable enough to have trouble noticing or experiencing them fully.
Maybe sometimes the obstacle is the way.🤷♀️
You don’t need to wait until you feel comfortable in order to settle in and feel grateful.
Instead, you practice finding joy in the sometimes-complicated, often-uncomfortable journey and noticing what’s already good. Then, somewhere along the way, comfort is cultivated.
I truly believe that I create my community, wherever I go.
Even if it’s not natural at first, when not feeling my best, I find that the more I practice gratitude, the more I notice the good things and people around me, the more open I become to new connections and experiences, and the easier it is to create that community that I sometimes am craving when I’m away from the comforts of home.
Maybe you can relate? Perhaps you can also use the reminder that, even when it feels counterintuitive, feelings follow action, not the other way around?