Pivotal People
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Pivotal People
Taking Nothing For Granted: A Practical Path To Joy, Presence, And Enough
Welcome to our second episode with Kristi Nelson, author of the wonderful book, "Wake Up Grateful." I read her book 4 years ago when she was on the podcast the first time and it has influenced my perspective and life outlook ever since. I asked her to come back on to share her wisdom with our larger audience today. You will be grateful for her wisdom!
As an added bonus, we are giving away 5 FREE copies of her book, Wake Up Grateful, to lucky listeners. Just go to my website, StephanieNelson.com and sign up for the email newsletter to be entered into the giveaway.
We explore gratefulness as a durable way of living, not a fleeting reaction, and share practices that turn ordinary days into sources of meaning. Author Kristi Nelson offers a humane path to presence, enoughness, and love while honoring grief as part of a full life.
• difference between gratitude as reaction and gratefulness as orientation
• waking up grateful and taking nothing for granted
• cancer story shaping a daily practice of presence
• contentment, enoughness and escaping social comparison
• top five regrets of the dying as guidance
• super soaking attention to expand time
• appreciation is generative in relationships and care
• legacy check on who matters most
• the “I get to” reframe for daily tasks
• holding joy and grief together without bypassing
• replacing complaint with celebration and generosity
Go to stephanienelson.com and sign up for the email newsletter to enter the giveaway for five free copies of Wake Up Grateful
Save 70%! Order Stephanie's book Imagine More: Do What You Love, Discover Your Potential
Learn more at StephanieNelson.com
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So I'd like to welcome Christy Nelson to the Pivotal People Podcast for the second time. I have not written an introduction. I'm going to say this off the top of my head because I am so excited about today. Christy was our 11th episode, almost four years ago. She wrote a fabulous book we're going to talk about called Wake Up Grateful, The Transformative Practice of Taking Nothing for Granted. Now you've heard about gratitude. You've heard lots of things about gratitude. And you're thinking, oh, here goes another thing about gratitude. I heard Christy four years ago on someone else's podcast. And I said, oh my gosh, that is a whole different lens to look through. Wait a minute. This is fascinating. I want to get on her train. I want to understand, really understand what she's talking about. I ordered her book. I read it cover to cover and I emailed her and asked if she'd come on my podcast. I was brand new. And she said yes. And I'm so grateful for that, not just because she came on and you all heard her, but I began to adopt the practices she's going to tell us about today. And I told her before we started recording, it is four years later. And I thought, oh my gosh, this wonderful author has changed my life. And I have never let her know that. And so I reached out to her and I said, What I just said to you. And I said, Christy, would you mind coming back on the podcast? And she said, Yes. So I'm I have goosebumps right now. I kind of have like this fangirl thing. And I want all of you to stay on here and listen because I hope that this changes your life too. And I'm just going to say two things. One is everyone needs to read her book. And so we're going to give away five free copies of her book. If you go to my website, which is stephanynelson.com, we've got an email newsletter signed up at the top. Just give me your name, your email, and you'll be entered. And we will make sure that at least five people get a free copy of her book. And the other thing I'm going to say is if at any point you hear something that resonates with you or someone in your life, some of the best lessons I've had from podcasts are from friends or relatives who shared an episode with me. This is so powerful. I'm just going to ask you to be aware of that and share this with maybe one or two or three of your friends, your kids, your spouse, anyone who you think could benefit from this wisdom. So I'm going to try not to talk so much because I want you to hear from Christy. Christy, thank you for being here. I am so happy to see you. I'm so happy to see you.
SPEAKER_00:And I'm just overcome with appreciation. Honestly, I feel so moved by your trust in me and your support. Thank you so much and for giving away free books. That's really beautiful. I, Stephanie, you're amazing. And congratulations on four years of doing this work. Beautiful work in the world.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you. It doesn't feel like work. It's such a gift to meet people like you and to share it. So let's start out. Let's people are like, okay, what do you mean, gratitude? I know what gratitude is. Christy has a really amazing story. If you could two things. First of all, tell us gratefulness and gratitude, semantics are different.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So you could share that with us and kind of give us your story of how you came to this concept in the first place.
SPEAKER_00:Well, the concept is also older than I am, which is wonderful to actually bow to the wiser teachers, Brother David Steinglast, who is now almost 100 years old and he lives in Austria. And gratefulness has been talked about by, you know, people who talk about mindfulness also talk about gratefulness, tick not, and it's it's not commonly used, but certainly I have attempted to catapult it into the world. So gratefulness is so resonant for me in a way that gratitude is not. Gratitude is lovely, but it's very limited for me in terms of its real application or our ability to make meaning out of gratitude in the same way that we can out of gratefulness. I'll tell you really quickly, if this is okay, I'll just say the difference, and then I'll tell you how I came to that from my story. So gratefulness is really an orientation to life. Gratefulness is big, I call it greeting the gratefulness of life with gratefulness of heart. So that's one of the ways that I like to talk about it. And it's different than gratitude because it's not just that we're greeting the things that we like, the things that we want. So gratitude is usually a feeling response reaction to getting what we want. Something goes our way, we express gratitude, we feel gratitude, and then it's over. And then we, you know, gratitude goes away. It's very conditional and it's very fleeting. So that's not tenacious enough for me. I want something that really is robust and can stand up to life as it is. And so gratefulness is taking nothing for granted. It's really about saying, life, this is gratitude for life. This is if we're here and we're breathing, and if we can hear these words, if you can see through your eyes, if you can wake up in the morning and get yourself out of bed, up until your very last breath in life, you can experience gratefulness. And it's about really looking at what is available to us in any given moment. We can't be grateful for everything, but we can be grateful in every moment. And that's a key distinction. So is that a good starting place for my story?
SPEAKER_02:That's a good starting point. I wake up grateful is the title of your book, but it's also the phrase that has stuck with me these four years. Like you said, just being grateful for the fact that we woke up. We've all lost people we loved, we've all seen people die too soon. And instead of complaining about getting older when a close friend of mine died too early, that shifted my perspective because it's all perspective, right? It's just perspective. So waking up grateful, starting your day saying, I am just grateful, I am alive. Thank you for that. I am alive. Sometimes I'm like, I look over at my husband. I'm like, I am so grateful he didn't sneak out in the middle of the night. He could have.
SPEAKER_00:He's still here. All kinds of things are possible. God, and don't go through all the all the all all the awful possibilities, but basically, it's about not taking for granted what you do have. It's not taking for granted the senses that we do have. It's it's and they're only going to diminish over time, right? So, like we didn't always used to have what we have, we won't always have what we have. And a lot of people would give anything to have what we take for granted. The things that we take for granted are gifts and blessings and extraordinary good fortune. And we tend to walk right by things that Marlon Rico Lee says be grateful for the things in people in your life. Everything you take for granted, someone is praying for. Someone somewhere is praying for. Every single thing, not one single thing do you have that someone isn't praying for or longing for with all their heart. And someday you will also long for what you currently have now, the limitations that we currently have, the things that we complain about. A lot of times within those things are gifts and capacities that we will wish we had one day, because aging it is a natural process of losses, right? And so can we love what we have now and live into that in a way that we don't die with regrets the way that so many people do, and say, I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish, I wish I'd appreciated more the people, I wish I'd appreciated more the time I had. I wish I'd been more fully present in my whatever, my my marriage, my relationship with my children, with my parents. So I just think there's so much we can do to pay attention to and recognize and appreciate what we have and not take those things for granted. So that's gratefulness. Gratefulness is really living into that energy. When I was 32, was diagnosed with stage four atypical lymphoma, and I I did have a very aggressive cancer that was that metastasized to my spine. And I, you know, I had radiation and chemotherapy and 11 surgeries, and I did all the alternative stuff. I did everything that I could possibly do. And yet I didn't have a very good prognosis. So what was extraordinary was to have the chance to keep going in life and to realize, oh, what happens if I don't take this day for granted? Like I have no idea how many days I have left. And if I get up in the morning and say, this is a wonderful day, like Maya Angela says, I've never seen this day before. I've never seen this day before. This is a wonderful day. So every day is an opportunity, every moment is an opportunity. And so, how do we live into that and the true invitation of that? And I think there's something that's a gift about actually facing death and not dying, you know, that I recognize and don't take for granted. Every day I'm so grateful that I got the chance to keep living. And yet, how I'm trying to teach, I'm trying to teach people, don't wait until you are close to death or till you've lost someone you love to value what you have. Can we live our days as a practice, moment-to-moment practice, being grateful and not taking things for granted, so that we don't, we don't wait too long, we don't wait too late, you know, for it to be too late in order to really appreciate the blessings of our lives.
SPEAKER_02:That's right. And you know, what stuck out, one of your many quotes that stuck out to me, and again, I'm paraphrasing because I'm not reading it, but is the whole idea of you experienced this truly near-death experience at a very young age. And you lived. And how you would wake up in the morning and like feel your face and say, Oh my gosh, I'm here. And everything was so new and how beautiful that was, but you don't want other people to have to go through the suffering that you went through in order to experience that. So that is why for the past 30-some years, you have been sharing this sincere, authentic message, even after 30-some years. If you could see her face, she is just lit up about this. This is what you really, this is what you're bringing to the world. And you have so many great quotes. I quoted this to my son today, and he was not as hit by it as I was, but this is so true. It is not happiness that makes us grateful, it is gratefulness that makes us happy.
SPEAKER_00:True, too, too.
SPEAKER_02:Oh my gosh, we gotta just say that every day because we have enough. You know, in another part of the book, you uh someone you quoted said, you know, we rush by contentment every single day. We just rush right by it in our race to find it.
SPEAKER_00:Everything that we have is enough. I think also, too, we don't think contentment is enough. We think we should be blissed and we think we should have joy and happiness, and and what does it look like? It looks like ecstasy, it looks like, you know, just the kind of the levels have so gotten up and higher. And I think with influencers and social media and like, you know, we get these kind of bizarre, rarefied glimpses into people's lives that aren't real. They don't tell the whole story. And so we think, oh gosh, I'm struggling. And so this means I'm exempt from this. No, happiness is the byproduct, contentment is the byproduct of being grateful. I believe that so deeply in my whole heart, and I've had that experience over and over again because I can be happy, but if I'm not really taking stock of what is so extraordinary about my life and what I already have, like I love that saying, Andrea Gibson, who is an extraordinary poet who I loved also, Andrea Gibson says, um, all my prayers were answered when I started praying for what I already have. Mm-hmm. That's contentment. That's, and how can we let that feeling to look around and say, what do I have? And what would I miss if it was gone? And what do I walk right by and not appreciate fully? And and I always invite people in my workshops and stuff, maybe there are things you want to give away because somebody else would not walk right by it as if it had no meaning to them anymore. Sometimes we have more things than we can appreciate, really. And so what if we gave away to people who could put on the front? I always say, like, take the things from the back of your shelves and give them to people who will put them on the front of their shelves. And then that appreciation is so much more fully alive. And the things and the people who you can't really appreciate get what they deserve, you know.
SPEAKER_02:My husband said, I've again, you know, I'm I've been talking about this for a week. My husband said, Well, it's easy for you to say that, you know, gratefulness is the key to everything, Stephanie, because I'm retired, I'm 62 years old, I've gone through the hard things of life, I've you know, survived some difficult things. I've our kids are raised, I'm a grandmother. I mean, I'm on easy street in his mind. You know, he's right, and my son's, you know, in the mid middle of his career. He said it's easy for you to say because you have everything. And I said, but here's what I've learned is that I've always had enough. The things now at this point in my life, Christy, that I think of, when I sit down and write in my gratitude journal every night, which I do recommend, it really is helpful because at the end of the day, you're saying, wow, all these little things that happened over the course of the day that I almost forgot. Let me write it down and just remember. And you see a theme. You see a theme. I've done this for years. So I can look over everything I've written, and they all have to do with relationship. This person called, this person texted. I spent time with this person, and you realize at this point in life, yes, you've got your retirement. Yes, you have money saved up. Maybe you have security, but the only thing that matters is love. Relationships, relationships, and I say freedom. We have the freedom. We have the freedom to walk across the room, we have the freedom to go to the grocery store. We have so many freedoms we take for granted. It's incredible. Yes. But I said to my husband, I wish 40 years ago when I had no savings, I had no job, I had no car just out of college, I had all the things I have right now that I care about the most. I had them then. If I had realized that then, I'm not saying you shouldn't have a career and you shouldn't have goals and you shouldn't work hard, but I would have been free from fear, jealousy, competitiveness, anxiety. I could have pursued that same journey in a different way if I had realized I already have enough of what matters. Love freedom in my life. Yeah, that's what I want young people to understand. That's what I want the people who I love in my life to understand. You guys, you're you don't have to stop doing that retirement fund calculator thing. That's making crazy.
SPEAKER_00:I think, no, no, no. I think you're really right. And I think that that's such a beautiful way to think about it is before we started all of our, you know, quests for more, like all of the things that we thought we needed to accomplish and all of the things we needed to, you know, get behind us, right? Like, you know, talk about a terrible thing. It's like you want to get on the other side of all these things so that then what? So that you can go back and appreciate the things that you had before you even were on that 40-year quest of. And so I think those are just such powerful lessons. And I think it's true that there, once our basic needs are met, and this is really important. We're not saying that people who don't have their basic needs met should all be grateful for what they have and just be content and not want more. You know, there there really are basic needs that are really critical to have met in order for us to, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, whatever you want to look at. So security needs and those kinds of things. Once the basic needs are met, the people who have more do not tend to be more happy. You know, there is that kind of curve, the happiness curve, the fulfillment curve, where, you know, I really do think that there's a place where we're just taught to want more and more and more and more. And that quest negates so much of what we already have. And then it really is true that um when I teach, I teach the five top regrets of the dying. And it's a very powerful teaching. Um Brawny Ware is a woman who leads the hospice work in England and wrote a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. It's very powerful because you can look at that as an instruction guide for what really makes sense. What do people who are on their deathbeds look back and say, I wish I had? And one of them is let myself be happier. And what's interesting is it's not, I wish I had been happier. I wish I had let myself be happier. So what are we doing to not let ourselves be happy? That's something really good to look at. I wish I had stayed in better touch with friends and family and relationships that matter to me. And so the truth is, it's not about having things. Nobody's talking about that. They're talking about free time, rest, doing things that, you know, playing and being in relationship and being happy, letting themselves be happy. So we have a lot to learn about how to live gratefully now. There's so much wisdom and guidance out there. And mostly it's about looking around and taking inventory and saying, what is it that I'm taking for granted right now that if I didn't have it, it would be a real loss for me? I would grieve the loss of something. That's an important question because it's so much. It's like when we lose the power, right? Have you guys lost power when you have a big storm and you lose power? It comes on and you appreciate electricity again in a way that you didn't before. And so it's like, oh my God, I love this. I'm never going to take it for granted again. Yeah, well, a day later, it's now in your expectations. It's in your what you feel entitled to. Your life is just wrapped around it. So it's and becomes a necessity instead of really the luxury in many ways that it is, you know, when we look around at how some people around the world are living. So I just think it's another lens to look at what we have with a much deeper sense of valuing. And there is a really cool invitation. I love practices like and quotes that invite us to consider these things, like the Marlon Rico Lee quote. But this one is what if you woke up tomorrow with only the things you were grateful for yesterday? Wow. What if you woke up tomorrow with only the things that you were grateful for yesterday? And I think that is an extraordinary pointer to what didn't you appreciate that you have that is begging for your appreciation. And so what I say to people is so here's the beautiful gift of that is you've got today to make good on it. Because tomorrow hasn't happened. You know, it's like, let's make the next tomorrow better by appreciating today everything that you want to be, make sure that you. Have two days from now. It's like so we get this opportunity in every single moment of every day to really treasure, cherish, appreciate the things that we have, and to let that be known, you know, through words, through gestures, to people, how we take care of things, you know.
SPEAKER_02:You can tell what we value based on where we spend our time. Totally totally. There's so many great things in her book that I've written them, I told you I've written them down, but I'm just going to say the ones off the top of my head. One of the things that I really appreciated was the idea of letting ourselves soak up what we enjoy. So many times we think we're busy. We have to go do this, we have to go do that. Instead of like stop and think for a minute, what is it you really enjoy? You know, what do you really enjoy? Maybe it's eating a great meal. Okay, you know what? There's don't feel guilty about that. Who cares how many calories? Turn off the TV, don't look at your phone, and just truly enjoy that meal. Or what if it's a person? Yesterday I had the privilege of babysitting my six-month-old granddaughter. And, you know, no one's there. It's just me and her. And thankfully, my son and daughter-in-law let me babysit a lot. And I'm the grandmother now. I don't have anything else I have to do. And I didn't do this with my own kids. I sit on the floor and I watch every move she makes. And every move she makes is a pure delight. I mean, I it's it's I can't explain it except to say I went over yesterday after reading that part in your book. I'm like, I am just gonna so soak this up because it like powers you up, but it's a bottomless pit, Christy. I want to go back today. But it's just like letting ourselves a beautiful walk in nature. Yes. Look around. I mean, so many things that are like you said, happiness is always available to us. This is always available to us. We just have to soak it up or notice it or not be distracted by things that we think we have to do. It's very freeing. It's very free.
SPEAKER_00:It's very freeing. Let me say one thing about I call it super soaking because there is actually a setting on a washing machine that you can super soak things. And I think that's so fascinating. So it's like, don't just let it go through the motions. Don't just, you know, go let life and your moments and your interactions and everything go through the motions. And what it really is relying on, Stephanie, is being more present. It's about being fully present. Super soaking is about being all here, all in. And so that you're not, you're not distracted by the past or the future. You're fully present. And I think babies and children really bring that about in us. Caregiving often does. It's kind of this, you know, we bring ourselves fully to bear. Um, and I'm caretaking my dad, and you know, it's a beautiful thing. So I know that opportunity to be fully present. Once we're fully present, there's such a gift because it actually is the thing that I think one thing we can do that expands time. Like we don't get to know how long we're gonna live. And there, I don't think, I think a lot of the longevity concepts are all just cracker barrel. Sorry, it's like, it's like snake oil. It's like um a lot of these ideas, it's like, oh, if I do this and do this and do this and do this, and there's still the proverbial bus or train or whatever that like comes barreling down the road and you don't know. We don't know. But what I do know, and what everybody knows and can experience for themselves is that when you're fully present, your sense of time expands. And you're more, you're not somewhere else during the moments that you're alive. So then you're like wanting to go back and like, oh, how did this day go so quickly? Well, I wasn't ever really fully where I was. So it's a great experiment to try being, you know, 10 minutes, just fully, fully on, fully present, and have that sense of of how that 10 minutes lives so much more vividly, so much more alive inside of us. And we can recall it better, but also we're we're more fully present for whatever's gonna unfold in that time. And that's delicious. Like that's really enjoying life.
SPEAKER_02:And it's also giving to someone, it's like listening better.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Listening better. You know, my husband was telling me something today, and I was in the middle of your book. I'm like, okay, really listen. Really listen. He's like, What are you doing? Like, I'm really listening to you. Oh, that's okay. Don't scare me, he says.
SPEAKER_00:But I do your face. But I do think there is, yeah, there is one of those. Um, it's one of the principles in the book, which is appreciation is generative. When you tend what you value, what you value thrives, and you tend with your attention. So when when there are things that you value and you love, those are the things that you should be paying attention. I don't like to use the word should, but those are the things calling for our attention and for our tending. And then those are the things that will thrive in our lives, the relationships, the rooms that we pay attention to, the corners of our house we pay attention to, the pe you know, all the things, the plants, the things where the places where we put our beloved attention will thrive. And it's that simple. So I think there's something really critical about that. And that's really about appreciating what you have. First, you have to notice that you have it.
SPEAKER_02:You have lots of really neat prompts in the book, like to prompt your thinking. One was talking about legacy. And I don't mean legacy like leaving people money or you talked about imagine that you are in the last days of your life. And I went through this with my parents, you know, my mother and my father, we had the vigil at the end of their life, and and everyone's around your bed. Who's there? And that exercise immediately the people popped in my head who would be there. And the next thought is okay, you are alive. When is the last time you talked to your niece? My niece was there. I had my nieces and my nephews and my sister and my brother and their spouses, and my husband, and my kids, and their spouses. Okay, that immediately populated your mind in less than half a second. Yeah, you are alive. You have every opportunity to connect with them and to show them love and go ahead and do that. Don't wait until that deathbed moment. You're alive. You can do all that right now. You know who you love the most because that's who popped in your head.
SPEAKER_00:Such a great exercise. It sounds kind of morbid, but it's actually really powerful and beautiful because I think the other thing is too. I know that one of the hardest things is when you learn that someone who you haven't been in touch with, who you love, has passed, right? That's nobody wishes that for to experience that for anybody. And yet we have the ability to reach out so much more than we do, to let people know how much we love them, you know, to not hold back at all. And so, you know, what a great way to spend a life is to, I want to make sure that you know how much I love you. I want to make sure that you know how much I care about you. I want to make sure that you know what an inspiration you are to me and how much you mean to me. And and those words will never be wasted. And there's and they create ripples that then people do that more like don't hold your heart back, gratefulness of heart, and just how do we greet the world with that gratefulness of heart? It's the willingness to be vulnerable, it's the willingness to take the lead in that kind of putting your heart on your sleeve or outside your chest or however you want to wear it, and and just let it be known.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Don't wait. Don't wait. Everyone appreciates that. They'll be writing that in their gratitude journal.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So this is a process. So people can't listen to or just read a book and all of a sudden have this full life of gratefulness, waking up grateful. And what I appreciated about your book is that you recognize this is a lifelong process, just like exercising. You can exercise for six months and get in great shape, but if you stop exercising, you're gonna go back to being in bad shape. It's a daily exercise and you benefit from it each day. So if someone's listening to this and they're like, okay, I'm kind of interested. What do I do? How do I get this gratefulness? What are the steps I take beyond getting her book, Wake Up Grateful? It's a formative practice of taking nothing for granted. But what is your advice to people? You do workshops about this, you speak about this. How do people kind of begin?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I think one of the most powerful practices is the get-to practice. The I get to. And and we may have spoken about it in our last session. I don't know, but that was four years ago. So I I actually now I made these little bracelets. So it says, I get to. And what what this practice is is to think about all the things that you have to do in a day, or have to do in your week, or have to do this afternoon, or what are the things that you have to do in your life, you know? And we feel often this term, I I like to use it because it feels so resonant for me. We feel beleaguered by all that we need to do, all that we have to do. And yet we get to do those things. Those things are privileges and opportunities. They're not just obligations. And when we switch that energy, so it's one of the things that I like to do is really do um have to get to list or to just write, I get to at the top of a page today. I get to call and reschedule a medical appointment, I get to pay my bills, I get to return something to a store, I get to cook dinner for my family. And as opposed to, I have to. So you ask people, what do you have to do today? And people can tell you 25 things that they have to do. And all of them feel like, in some ways, we wish we were doing something else. And one of the ways that I am really in touch with this is caregiving. So caregiving for my elders. When I love the people I love, I get to take care of them. And sometimes it feels like it's a lot, and it's, you know, it's kind of switching that sense of burdensome to blessing or that sense of beleagueredness to befriending. And that's an easy switch. Those are really easy switches when you say, I get to because I can. I can. I actually have a car, I have money with which to go grocery shopping. I actually can buy myself groceries. I can get myself over. I get to take care of my dad because I still have a dad to take care of. And one day soon I'm not gonna have him anymore. So I get to remind me of the privilege that I'm enjoying right now in my life. Having children, having parents, having friends, having a body that needs to be taken care of. I get to go to the doctor. I get to go to the dentist next week. All those things are reframable. And that reframe is what you said before in the beginning. It's all about perspective. Can you cultivate that sense of perspective about your life so that you see it in the beautiful gift that it is? And every single day.
SPEAKER_02:I wrote down a whole list of, again, I was explaining this to my son today, whole list of things. Like I wrote, I hate cleaning the bathrooms. Well, well, now wait a minute. I get to clean the bathrooms because in this modern age, we have these inside bathrooms. They used to have outhouses. Can I not be grateful that I get to take a bath and a bathtub if I want to? Or, you know, like I have to make dinner. I get to make dinner. We have food. I mean, there's so many, it's so easy. I love it that you have a bracelet that says I get to. That is beautiful because that power. When you do this, everyone do this. I'm gonna say, think of a couple of things and say it out loud. I have to do this, and then change it to the I get to. It feels 180 degrees different. It totally does.
SPEAKER_00:It does. And I I have to go to work. I get to go to work. You know, like the truth is, I think, and it's not about saying you should suffer the things in your life that are awful with a smile on your face. Because, you know, there are sometimes things you have to change in order to really, you know. So I'm not saying if there are things that are tough that you're supposed to just smile it away. What I'm saying is there's so many things to the mechanics to our everyday, the mechanics to our relationships. I get to call somebody, I get to visit someone, I get to take care. But what we do is we, and if you start listening for this language, Stephanie, this is a really good clue. How many people do you hear all the time who say, I have to do this, I have to do this, I have to go shopping, I have to do, and at some point it's like you look at the person and you say, wow, you know, that's a lot of opportunity you're getting to enjoy for things that are kind of special that a lot of people would wish, again, be grateful for the things in people and have-to's in your life. Somebody somewhere is praying for what you take for granted. So it's like, I think there really is a switch that we can make in our minds that's important to keep trying on for size. And after a while, it becomes a little more organic. I even feel like this week, I even feel like I get to be sad. Sometimes I get, you know, because sadness is often I've had a challenging week for lots of reasons. I get to feel my feelings. I get to feel my sadness. And it's not that it's about being happy all the time. It's that if I can accept my sadness, and this is a strep sometimes for people, but then I'm more likely to learn something from it. I'm more likely to experience it differently instead of resisting it and pushing it away, which often makes it last longer and go deeper, like to listen, to listen to the sadness. I get to feel sad this week. And there's things happening that feel like that's it's a way of honoring the truth of what's not easy. And so I think even with our feelings, there are people who can't feel certain feelings. I think that would be a really terrible thing. You know, there where it's literally some kind of cognitive break. And so to be able to appreciate the full range of your feelings.
SPEAKER_02:And you talked in your book a lot. I love this. I mean, we are going to go through hard times. You're not saying that, you know, you have to be grateful and chipper and positive and Pollyanna sh all the time. You can, you know, it's one of those and things, right? I'm grateful and I'm grieving the loss of someone 100%. And if we try to live a life, this hit me in your book. If we try to live a life to protect ourselves from those kinds of pains and losses, we've lived an empty life. That's right. So it's like grief is the price of love.
SPEAKER_00:That's good. It's the most beautiful quote. It's one of the most beautiful quotes. And joy, joy is the gift of love, and grief is the cost of love. And so, are you going to not love so as not to feel grief? You know, that's a very sad, that's a sad kind of thing. And yes, you're right. I want to make sure to emphasize to people this is about and I feel joy. Like right now, the sun is out. It's like unbelievable, you know, I feel joy and I feel sad. And to make room for all of that to be so is to not present prevent ourselves from feeling the things that we shouldn't, you know, I don't want to judge the things that I feel. So I think one thing that this is a beautiful thing that I wrote in the it's in the epilogue to the paperback, but I'll quote myself, which is always a funny thing to do. When I fill my eyes with wonder and my heart with love or joy, I do not betray my concerns for the world. I nourish my capacity to attend to them. So I'll say it again. When I fill my eyes with wonder and my heart with love or joy, I don't betray my concerns for the world or for myself or for life or whatever. I don't betray my concerns. I nourish my capacity to attend to those things. So the concerns stay alive, but when I also add the joy, it's about remembering how much there is to be grateful for in a world that is very invested in complaint and comparison. So complaint and comparison are pervasive. And so, what can we celebrate as well? And if you want to really shift a conversation when somebody's complaining and complaining and complaining, talk about what you can celebrate, you know, and say, wow, you know, I see all those things. And I'm so grateful for this. Or I'm really looking at and acknowledging also the beauty of this day. And I want to really treasure that in the midst of whatever else is difficult.
SPEAKER_02:You know, we still have permission to experience joy, even if the world isn't perfect. I mean, that sounds so obvious. It's so silly to even say it. It's so obvious, but that is how we can behave. You know, I have to have constant moral outrage, or else I don't care. You know, I must not care about others if I'm not constant. And I'm like, you know what? I can't control that. I can only control loving people, I can only control my how I show up.
SPEAKER_00:I think this is so important because to be able to say maybe it's love and joy that help to make a more perfect world, right? So I don't want to give up the places in me that I have concerns about things and you know, whatever the moral outrage might be. And I know that love is the answer. You know, for me, love, loving more, what there's something else. I'm thinking about another quote that I've said that's that's often kind of plastered around, but it's life isn't perfect, people aren't perfect, love is the perfect response. You know, that just, you know, that there really are, there are so many opportunities for us to extend love and joy, to extend our generosity to people. Generosity of spirit is such a beautiful gift. And yet, if we're always in that place that's looking at what's lacking, we don't have anything to spare. We don't feel like we have enough to give. And that's the greatest tragedy of all to me, is that if we're really living inside scarcity and complaint all the time, then we don't have feel like we have enough to be able to share and to extend ourselves generously to others. And that's gonna make the world a better place for all of us, right?
SPEAKER_02:Oh man. And this is why I love this podcast. I mean, I am sitting at the feet of Christy saying, I just love that. What you just said, I am going to put that on a quote. We have to memorize that. That is so beautiful. We cannot let complaint and negativity and moral outrage kill the joy and love, which is the only thing that can overcome all that stuff.
SPEAKER_00:Right. It certainly is the force that the world is wanting and needing and waiting for. So who are we to withhold it? Right. And so sometimes I feel like I owe the world my grief. And I and I do owe the world my grief, and I also owe the world my joy. And that joy is such a gift to the grief, right? They go hand in hand. The loss of what we celebrate is always going to generate grief. That's what people don't understand that like grief isn't. Supposed to get smaller over time. We're supposed to get bigger around our grief. You know what I mean? Grief is a really powerful testament to what we love and that we've lost in our lives. Anyone, any person, we honor things and people with our grief. And we honor life by surrounding that grief with what there is to celebrate and appreciate. And I think that's a really powerful lesson.
SPEAKER_02:I love that. That is so good. And I've gone way over time because you know, how do you put a time limit on wisdom? But anyone listening to this, I want to say again, you could get Christy's book. Go to my website, stephanynelson.com, sign up for the newsletter. We're going to give away five copies. She also has so much wisdom. I just hope that you would share this with someone, someone in your life who could really benefit from this new perspective. She has many other books. And so I want to direct you to her website. It's ChristyNelson.net.net, yes, exactly. Yeah, so it's Christy K-R-I-S-T-I Nelson. I hope you know how to spell that.net. And she has um a bunch of cool things. One is she teaches a workshop on aging gratefully. I love that. That's going to be our next podcast episode with her because there's so much to talk about there. And she also has other tools and resources. She has a really neat, what I would call a devotional reflection book called Everyday Gratitude, inspirational quotes and reflections. And she also has this. This is a great tool called Gratitude Explorers Workbook. It walks people through exercises and it's a great tool. We talked about it before we started, perhaps for young adults, teenagers, college kids, that's a really struggling age group right now. And anything we can do to help anyone we know in that age group will help. And certainly if they could learn at a young age what gratefulness is, they're going to get a much healthier start in life. And again, Christy's book is on Amazon. It's in paperback now, and it has sold really well for six years. So I think that should tell us something. But have I left anything out? How can people reach you? And um, what else are you offering that they might want to know about?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, I just am so I am so thankful. I signing up for my monthly newsletter. It's a fun thing. I send out every month a little reflective piece and then some resources and things that are inspiring. I think it's a worthwhile, I think this gratefulness is a really, really worthwhile perspective shift and practice. And I am so thankful to you, Stephanie. So just your uplifting this work. And again, after four years, it couldn't be more lovely and appreciated by me. And and you can always reach me through my website. And I'm just honored and and just delighted. And again, in the face of all of what we don't know, to know that love is just the most beautiful gift. And so thank you for continuing to spread it.
SPEAKER_02:Well, thank you for your work and thanks so much for taking the time to be here. And we'll see you next time. I look forward to it.
SPEAKER_00:I'll see you in four years or less.
SPEAKER_02:Okay.
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