Which Part of the Story Do You Choose to Remember?

How gratitude changes the way we remember the hard, funny, unexpected parts of our lives

There are days in our lives that could be told more than one way.

I have one of those stories from Turkey.

I was visiting Pergamon, one of the great ancient sites in western Turkey. I had gone up to the Acropolis, high above the modern town of Bergama, and somewhere along the way, what had begun as an adventure stopped feeling quite so adventurous. I was hot. I was tired. I was lost. And I was alone in a foreign country trying to figure out exactly what I was going to do next.

Those are the facts of the story.

If I wanted to, I could probably still tell it as the day I got lost and scared on the top of a mountain in Turkey. That would not be untrue. I remember how vulnerable I felt in that moment, because there is something very different about getting turned around when you are traveling alone. At home, being lost is usually an inconvenience. Somewhere unfamiliar, especially when you are already exhausted and overheated, it can become frightening very quickly.

But that is not really the story I carry with me.

Because other people entered it.

A Turkish couple helped me. Then there was another Turkish man who showed me kindness when I needed it. I was able to get something to drink, sit down in the shade, and recover from what had become an overwhelming situation.

I was even offered a ride down that extremely steep, curving mountain on the back of a fairly small motorbike. And as much as this girl loves motorcycles, that was one ride she did not take him up on.

And suddenly, the day looked different.

Nothing erased the fact that I had been lost. I had still been hot. I had still been frightened. The difficult part of the experience did not magically disappear because someone was kind to me.

But it stopped being the whole story.

When I think about Pergamon now, I do not immediately think about fear. I think about kindness. I think about people who had no obligation to help me but did. I think about that extraordinary place, sitting high above the landscape, and the relief of discovering once again that sometimes the person you need appears in your life at exactly the right moment.

I think this is one of the things gratitude has done for me over the years. It has changed the way I remember my life.

We often talk about gratitude as though it is simply remembering to say thank you or making a list of things we appreciate. There is certainly nothing wrong with either of those things. But I think gratitude can go much deeper than that.

Gratitude can change which part of the story gets the final word.

Every experience contains more than one thing. A day can be frustrating and funny. A season of life can contain tremendous loss and unexpected friendship. Something can go terribly wrong and still introduce us to someone we would never have met had everything gone according to plan.

Both things can be true.

That matters to me because I do not believe gratitude requires us to rewrite our lives and turn painful experiences into happy ones. There are things that hurt. There are disappointments that remain disappointments. There are losses for which I am never going to be grateful simply because someone tells me I should find the blessing in them.

That is not what gratitude means to me.

Gratitude simply allows me to ask another question.

What else was true?

Yes, I was lost at Pergamon. What else was true?

Someone noticed.

Someone helped.

Someone showed me kindness.

I was not as alone as I felt.

Once you begin asking that question, you discover how many experiences in your life contain an and.

I was frightened, and someone came alongside me.

I was disappointed, and something unexpected grew from it.

I lost something I loved, and I discovered something about myself that I might never have known otherwise.

I went through something I would never choose to repeat, and there was still goodness somewhere inside the story.

Perhaps that is what an attitude of gratitude really does to our perception. It does not force us to look away from what is difficult. It gives us a wider field of vision.

Without gratitude, I can look at one painful piece of an experience and decide that it explains everything. With gratitude, I am more likely to look around the edges of that experience and notice the people, moments, kindness, beauty, humor, provision, or grace that existed alongside it.

The landscape has not changed.

I am simply seeing more of it.

And when I think about the life I have lived, especially all the unexpected places it has taken me, I realize how different my own story could sound depending upon which moments I chose to emphasize.

I could tell you about the times I was scared.

Or I could tell you about the people who showed up.

I could tell you about plans that fell apart.

Or I could tell you about what happened because they did.

I could tell you about things I have lost.

Or I could tell you about the people and places I never would have known if my life had gone exactly the way I once thought it should.

The truth is that all of those things belong to my story.

Gratitude has not erased the difficult chapters.

It has simply taught me not to let them tell the whole story.

Maybe that is one of the greatest gifts gratitude gives us. It does not necessarily change the life we have lived.

It changes what we are able to see when we look back at it.

And sometimes, years later, the part we are most grateful for turns out to be the very part of the story we never could have planned.

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Continue the Conversation

What is a moment in your life that did not go as planned, but gave you something unexpectedly good?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Some of my favorite conversations begin there, and I read every one.

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Until next time, may you find a little more joy in the ordinary.

— Deronda

The Joy Ambassador | Architect of Joy