The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/gratitude/)
While it’s true that winter can be isolating, take the additional alone time as an opportunity to reflect on where you are in life right now. Are you satisfied with the life you’re living? Is there anything you’d like to change about it? There are a million more questions I could ask you, but the rest are for you to figure out on your own.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been practicing the action of making gratitude lists. The name is self-explanatory, and the action is intuitive. I encourage you once a week to take 10 minutes out of your day and write down all the things that you’re grateful for. The act of creating a gratitude list retrains your brain to focus on the good things in your life; you’ll be less tempted to give into a negative thought process. In fact, it will be easier to get through repeated hardship, the times of life when these lows seem unremitting.
I’ve learned the importance of practicing gratitude, especially in a college setting, because it grounds my mind when life becomes overwhelming. Taking time to appreciate the little things in life reminds me of all of my blessings and reestablishes my personal motivations during my time here at Cornell.
Cornell, like the rest of society, prioritizes achievement. In our infinite ambition, we’re always seeking something else. In pursuit of this ideal of more and more, we often live our lives from goal to goal, or contrastingly, from crisis to crisis. The world we live in is obsessed with the things we lack or the things that could be better. We crave comfort, yet at the same time, we too often take the comfort of normality for granted.
Sometimes a person can change your life without even knowing how much they have impacted you. I want to talk about one such person who kept me calm as I was rushed to the emergency room with my arm bleeding and my body and dress splattered with red. When my friends called 911 after I tried to commit suicide, there was one EMT responder, a woman, who I will be forever be grateful towards. She doesn’t know the effect her words had on me, but I wish I could tell her. As I was being transported to the hospital, I told her what had happened to me and about my flashbacks.