On Glimmers, the Advice to Look for Pockets of Joy, and Why Gratitude Works Better Small Than Large — a writer’s diary entry, 7th of September

Monday, and a good one. I had my tea outside on the step at about half seven because it was cool enough to want the sun on me for once, and the green woodpecker was going at the dead poplar the way it does, and the light was coming in low and sideways across the top of the hedge. I sat there for maybe forty seconds noticing all of it. Then I went in and got on with my day.

People call these glimmers now. It is a term out of the polyvagal work, the opposite number to a trigger, the small cue that tells your nervous system it is safe for a second. I like that somebody has given it a name, because the thing itself is real and it had no name when I needed it.

What I had instead was my sister on the phone, four years ago, when I could not get through an afternoon without my chest going tight. She said, look for pockets of joy. I remember being fairly annoyed by it. Pockets of joy, when I had left my marriage and my whole life was in boxes and I could not see how any of it was going to work. But she is not a woman who says things for the sake of it, so I tried it, mostly to be able to tell her I had tried it.

It was very small and quite mechanical at first. When the thoughts started going round, I made myself stop and be still and find one thing. Not a whole minute. Long enough to hear the birds through the window. Long enough to notice that I was sitting in a room full of my own books, which I had wanted my entire adult life. Long enough to taste the tea, which was good tea, which I had made for myself. Then back to whatever I had been dreading. That was the whole practice and I felt daft doing it for months.

And then at some point in the second year I noticed I was doing it without deciding to. Something in me had started going out looking for the good bits on its own, in the middle of a perfectly rotten day, without asking my permission. That is the change. Not that the bad days stopped, they did not, but that they stopped being the only thing in the frame.

The trouble with how gratitude usually gets sold is that it comes in big sizes. Be grateful for your job. Your partner. Your children. Your lovely home. And you can be sitting there with all of it true on paper and feel absolutely nothing, which then makes you feel worse, because now you are ungrateful as well as miserable. It does not work at that scale. It works at the scale of a cup of tea and a bird on a dead tree. The small things are the ones you can actually reach on a bad morning, and reaching one is the entire mechanism.

I do not keep a gratitude list any more. I kept one for two years and it did its job and now the paper is unnecessary, which I think is what a practice is supposed to do eventually. The moon is a fingernail before dawn now, almost gone, new on Friday. Chapter eleven is behaving. The tea was good.