Michelle DeRusha

Every Day Faith. Faith Every Day.

gratitude

How to Replace a Bad Habit with a Better One

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“You complain all the time,” she said, turning around from the passenger seat to look me in the eye as I sat squashed between our two sons. “You are relentlessly negative.”

Only a sister could make such a declaration and live to tell about it.

My first reaction was defensiveness. “I am not relentlessly negative,” I shot back, emphatically shaking my head. “And I definitely do not complain all the time.”

My sister didn’t press the issue. She simply looked at me a beat too long, eyebrows raised, as if to say, “Oh really?” before turning around to face forward again.

The conversation in the car shifted to another topic. I wasn’t angry, and I didn’t hold my sister’s accusation against her. We DeRushas tend to speak forthrightly to one another – blame it on our no-nonsense Puritan sensibilities. But I also dismissed her declaration, refusing to even consider that there might be some truth in it.

Later, though, I couldn’t get Jeanine’s comments out of my head. I argued with her in my mind, continuing to defend myself. But the more I tried to insist to myself that she was wrong, the more I realized she was right.

The truth is, I do complain. A lot.

I’m cold. I have a headache. My elbow hurts. I’m tired. The kids are bugging me. My work is boring. I have ennui. I’m sick of walking the dog. Why do I always have to be the one to empty the dishwasher? Who left their dirty socks in the middle of the living room floor? How come we never do anything fun? Is this all there is to life?

I complain for a lot of reasons: to get attention; to elevate myself; to garner sympathy and compassion; to be seen and heard.

But we don’t have to dig deeply into my psyche to identify the number one reason I complain. It’s actually quite simple: I complain because it’s a habit. Half the time I don’t even realize I’m doing it. Near-constant complaining has become my mindless modus operandi.

In her book Better than Before, Gretchen Rubin advises that we should “choose habits mindfully.” Choosing mindfully, it turns out, is the key not only to establishing a good habit, but also to breaking a bad one.

On January 1, my sister’s accusation still ringing in my ears, I resolved to break my habit of mindless complaining and relentless negativity. The challenge, I knew, was that I needed to do more than simply state my good intentions. I knew, as Rubin said, that I would need to mindfully choose a good habit that would, over time, help me begin to pave a new neural pathway in my brain.

Enter the daily gratitude journal.

Or, I should say, re-enter the gratitude journal.

Eight years ago, inspired by Ann Voskamp’s bestselling book One Thousand Gifts, I bought a cheap journal, laid it open on the kitchen counter between the coffee maker and the fruit bowl, picked up a pen, and began to list the everyday, ordinary moments that brought me joy. In total my kids and I and occasionally Brad listed 1,955 gifts over a three-year period.

The first gift listed was “spring song of the chickadee.” The last was penned by Brad, evidently on our anniversary: “18 years with my love.”

That was more than four years ago. Truthfully I don’t remember why I quit the gratitude journal. I don’t even remember when I closed the cover over its wrinkled pages and tucked the notebook into a cabinet, where it still lives today.

I keep my new gratitude journal – a beautiful notebook with a richly vibrant cover, a gift from a dear friend – on my nightstand. Every night before I click off the light, I think back over my day and pen three things for which I am grateful. Sometimes I list more than my three; occasionally it’s a challenge to come up with the bare minimum.

The truth is, I inherently lean toward glass-half-empty. My default is pessimism. Because it doesn’t come naturally to me, I need to choose optimism consciously, and one of the ways I’m trying to do that is to choose gratitude every day.

As with my prior journal, the things I’ve listed so far are ordinary, even mundane – coffee with a friend; glimpse of a sleek fox trotting across the golf course; January sun after a string of gray days. And yet I know that in some ways, it’s their very ordinariness that makes these gifts special.

Today I’m taking my “everyday, ordinary life – my sleeping, eating, going-to-work and walking-around life – and placing it before God as an offering.”

Today I’m mindfully choosing praise over complaint.

Today I’m choosing a new habit mindfully and beginning to repave a well-worn habit of complaint and negativity with one of gratitude.

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So tell me, do you keep a gratitude journal? And have you ever tried to quit a bad habit by replacing it with a better one? 

Stopping in a Grove of Pear Trees on a Spring Evening

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more pear trees

On Monday and Wednesday evenings I walk Josie around the circumference of the fields and the park while Rowan has soccer practice. This twice-weekly walk is my spring and fall ritual, a welcome break from our normal neighborhood route.

Josie is part beagle, which means she’s sniffy. That girl can snuff out a single Goldfish cracker half buried in the grass from twenty feet away. It used to irritate me that she stopped to smell so much. I considered our walks a chance to burn some calories after sitting at my desk for five or six hours straight. I aimed to break a sweat, or at the very least, elevate my heart rate.

Josie, on the other hand, partakes in our evening constitutional for one reason only: to explore the smorgasbord of smells. Scent is how she sees and experiences the world. It’s her delight. Once I realized smelling was the highlight of Josie’s day, I gave in. I let her nose dictate our path. Now I stop when and where she stops. I walk again when she has had her fill of a particular scent.

Last Thursday, Josie’s nose led us into a grove of Bradford pear trees on the far side of the park, and while she stopped to digest a particularly intriguing scent, I admired the white blossoms above my head. Pear blossoms stink, you should know – to my nose, like an unseemly combination of manure and decaying animal, although others suggest they smell like dead fish. My son Noah guesses that the stink attracts flies, which then buzz off with a generous dollop of pollen on their hairy bodies. It’s the species’ ingenuous though putrid way of ensuring its survival. Though the smell is unpleasant, as long as you don’t breathe through your nose, it doesn’t diminish the beauty of the trees, their lush blossoms so dense that from a distance they look like newly fallen snow clumped on limbs and branches.

pear trees 4

 

Pear limbs

As I stood in the cool shade beneath the canopy of blooms, something caught my eye – a tiny, colorful tag twirling and spinning in the breeze. Once I spotted this tag, I immediately began to see others. Dozens of them in primary colors clung to string which draped the pears’ lower boughs like Christmas garland, all the way around the entire circumference of the grove.

I stepped closer, tugging Josie along with me. On each tag, in black Sharpie cursive, were words — Love. Thank You. Life. Love you. And names – Sarah. Jennifer. Ryan. Dave. All around the trees, these simple words of gratitude and celebration, these names of people I didn’t know, clung to the branches, hidden, pirouetting in the dappled sunlight. You would never see them just walking by on the path. You had to step into the dim grove and stop with your face nearly immersed in the petals.

red tag

tag garland2

pear grove

pears from a distance2

I followed the string like a trail through the grove. It seemed the garland had been there awhile. It broke off here and there, leaving gaps, the end of the string fluttering, then resumed again a few branches later. As I read the tags I wondered about the story. There was a story there for sure, perhaps many stories behind those names and sentiments written in delicate black ink. Hands had written those words, threaded the tags onto the string, strung those words around the lowest boughs of the pear trees. Perhaps the garland had been threaded through blossoms and branches as a celebration, perhaps as a memorial. Perhaps both.

Josie grew bored with my garland marveling, and I finally gave in to her tugging. As we stepped out of the grove and into the bright sunlight, I felt a sense of awe and gratitude wash over me. I had stumbled upon a secret garden, a sacred place, and received a message. I had stood still, recited the names of people I don’t know, and gratefully accepted it all as a mysterious and unexpected gift.