A few hours before I crashed my car, I was horizontal on the floor of a friend’s house being purified by fire. At least, that was what the card I’d drawn from her card deck suggested.
My friend had invited six of us to a sound bath, creating one of those safe, non-judgmental spaces where it feels easy to relax and let go. As she moved around us with her Tibetan bowls, I felt something begin to course through me.
It wasn’t the soft golden light I’d vaguely expected. It felt more like fire, raw and cleansing, like a swift river of lava. Giving up on the soft tinkly bells I thought I’d signed up for, I surrendered to it and set an intention: to let anything that was out of alignment with the person I was becoming be swept away.
With hindsight, maybe I shouldn’t have done that.
Afterwards, I drove to the beach. It felt important to plant my feet in the sand. I had one of those strict conversations with myself, as you do. Paraphrasing here: “Life has to change. The way I’m showing up isn’t working out so well.”
Then I remembered a gratitude practice that I’d developed some time ago, a sequence I used to practice every day. It had helped me through a difficult period many years earlier when my life was changing profoundly. The present moment felt strangely similar, so I started talking to myself, out loud. Of course I pretended to be on my phone so nobody called the police.
What followed was a twenty-minute monologue praising the trees, the beach, and the silvery sky. And then I turned the corner and spied my beautiful, sleek, fat-bottomed Audi TT hugging the ground, waiting for me to climb in for our next adventure. She positively glowed with mischief.
Driving home through my neighborhood, I was still flooded with appreciation. In my imagination this feeling was spilling out of the car, blessing everyone on Main Street and circling the golfers on the hill.
Then, whack!
I watched, almost in slow motion, as the front of my beautiful car sailed into the air. My first thought was surprisingly prosaic: That could be expensive.
The vehicle that had hit me careened across the road. I remember tracking it, wrapping the driver in thoughts of protection and, at the same time, having a strange certainty that we would both be OK. Thankfully, we were. And then came the part I still find interesting.
I remember feeling no stress or panic, just deep, soft gratitude.
This wasn’t the type of thankfulness you manufacture because you’ve read somewhere that it’s good for you. I wasn’t sitting inside my wrecked car dutifully trying to think of three things I was grateful for. It was simply there, the backdrop to my experience. It was as if I’d been cushioned by an airbag of loving aunties.
The other driver was shaken and furious. I got out calmly and started clearing pieces of car from the road. One man whistled cheerfully while dodging traffic and sweeping debris from the road. Someone taped up the sad little dribble coming from my burst radiator. Then a woman materialized, almost genie-like, carrying a hot, sweet cup of tea and a notepad.
“How very British,” I remember thinking, having lived abroad for several years.
The insurance company was kind, and the recovery teams were considerate. Everyone seemed to want to help. It began to feel as though we’d all joined some strange conspiracy.
What do we practice when nothing is wrong?
Over the next few days, the gratitude didn’t diminish, and friends commented on how calmly I seemed to be dealing with the disruption. Some wondered whether I was in shock, but I just felt unusually present.
We tend to think of gratitude as a response to circumstances; something good happens and we feel grateful. But could practicing gratitude repeatedly change what becomes easier for us to notice later? I got curious and started researching.
In one randomized study, people entering psychotherapy for depression or anxiety were assigned to either therapy alone, therapy with expressive writing, or therapy with gratitude writing. Three months later, those in the gratitude-writing group showed more gratitude in their behavior and greater neural sensitivity to gratitude in the medial prefrontal cortex. The researchers suggested that the effects of the exercise might last beyond the writing itself.
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More recent research found that while a five-minute gratitude exercise didn’t significantly change participants’ positive memory bias, those who recorded a grateful event every day for two months subsequently showed greater positive memory bias than a control group.
The evidence is preliminary, and none of this proves that years of rehearsing gratitude caused my unusual response to the accident, but it did make me question why gratefulness was so readily available to me at a moment when I might reasonably have felt anything but it.
My car was badly damaged, and there was inconvenience and uncertainty. Gratitude didn’t make any of that disappear, but I didn’t have to go looking for what was good. I could still appreciate the damaged car and the intact bodies, the furious driver and the whistling stranger who helped me sweep the street. And I will never forget the woman who emerged from a house nearby carrying the hot, sweet tea.
The Audi was eventually written off, so there wasn’t even a happy ending, and I’m looking for a new adventure partner now, but what surprised me most about the accident wasn’t the crash or the aftermath. It was discovering that when everything went wrong, I didn’t have to remind myself to be grateful because I already was.
