Picnics and Gratefulness

As the food preparations for our little picnic were under-go, I scoured YouTube hoping to find the perfect upbeat playlist to mark the occasion, while I moaned about how ridiculous it was that there wasn’t a Spotify app on the TV. Around me, the warm air blew in the smell of the sun as one of my friends assembled a cheese board and the other, poorly sliced tomatoes. We set up a beautiful spread of cheeses, grapes, crackers, salad, corn, coleslaw, hot dogs topped with cooked aromatic onions all enjoyed with mimosas. With my friends’ laughter laced with mild intoxication from the Prosecco, I couldn’t help but be grateful. Grateful for my friends, the food, the weather, my pleasant mood, the front garden we sat in, the occasional bees that caused us to yelp, the sun, our lives and that moment. Things could be a lot worse.

Lately, I’ve began incorporating gratefulness as a form of humility and as a way to remember to slow down when my mind begins to race, and my breath quickens. I recognise how grateful I am to be where I am, to have the things I have and to have accomplished the things I’ve done. Recently, I finished my final year of my undergraduate degree and amongst a sea of other emotions, I was mostly relieved. University is no small feat and it is far more than walls that make a building. It’s making it through trying to figure out who you are, trying to understand society, realising the rest of your life is beginning and trying not to have a premature existential crisis but failing…often. Making it through university is sometimes letting go of the expectations you had of yourself, people and things, and if you do the work, starting to see the world clearer. It also means removing the rose-tinted glasses that childhood innocence often affords you or realising that despite a shitty childhood and adolescence you can choose to be different. Sometimes, it’s realising that university isn’t for you and choosing a different path. So, I am relieved and although none of the things university forced me to endure have subsided, I am starting to find an equilibrium. Despite corona virus being thrown into the mix with racism, I am here…post university, mid pandemic, pre-career and I’m learning.