The Real Work of Gratitude: Beyond the Cliches and Into the Cracks

Gratitude is one of those concepts that is marketed to sell more than it gets lived.

It's plastered everywhere - on Pinterest boards, layered under filtered sunset photos, stuffed into captions like a catchall fix for discomfort. But real gratitude? It doesn’t always glow bright, it doesn’t always feel like ease, and it definitely doesn’t come wrapped in aesthetically pleasing social media posts.

Sharing gratitude is a well-known method of showing love, but it rarely stems from true gratitude and often comes from the need to be socially accepted, admired, and seen as successful or flourishing.

Gratitude is a frequency. It feels like a quiet yet grounding pulse beyond the chaos, if you know how to tune into it.

It’s not something preformed.

It’s not something sold.

It’s lived.

Let me give it to you straight: Gratitude isn’t about pretending everything is fine or that you are happy as a clam. It’s not about looking at the chaos around you and sugarcoating it with a false sense of peace. That’s bypassing, and that is the opposite of what we’re building here.

Gratitude, in its truest form, is an anchor.

It’s the energy that makes the moment—not just the good ones, but the gritty ones too.

---

Eggs... Everywhere

I’m not speaking in metaphors when I say:

Last week, I walked into my kitchen and found a dozen eggs cracked on the floor—eggs I had just brought home ten minutes earlier. It was just two of my children-one with whom was very proud of his cracking abilities, me, and silence.

My first instinct wasn’t enlightenment—it was "here we go”.

The noise of the day, the pressure, the fatigue—it all echoed in the cracks. Pun intended.

As I was cleaning up these eggs, my mind wondered if being silent was the best option for the moment. Trust me, it was.

But afterwards, it had me thinking, scratch that, it had me reminding myself that moments are not the problem. My relationship with it is.

So, while I was cleaning up, I felt the usual lineup of surface-level reframes:

“I’m grateful it wasn’t on the carpet.”

“I’m grateful I had towels.”

“I’m grateful I didn’t need these eggs for one specific recipe.”

But let’s be honest—those were just mental placeholders.

What I was really doing was regulating, but was this gratitude sprouting as regulation? It was the respect for myself and my kids not to spiral. This was a quiet commitment to stay with myself, even when life was lifing in all kinds of muddy colors.

But if you’re serious about energy and sovereignty—and I am—then you start asking bigger questions once the wind stops blowing.

---

Where Are We Rooting From?

The question isn’t, “Can I find a silver lining?”

It’s, “Can I feel the entirety of where I am, even in the mess?”

Because here’s what I know:

Gratitude isn’t just about recognizing what’s good in life,

It’s about recognizing your own capacity to hold what’s hard while staying connected to what’s real.

You see, gratitude lives in your nervous system, not just your journal. It's expressed through living, and not just in one moment or just on sundays.

It lives in the way you take a breath instead of adding your own flavor of fuel to a dumpster fire. It’s in the way you clean up what cracked without collapsing with it.

In the way you remember: this life you’re building? It’s not owed to you. It’s co created by you. I beg for someone to tell that to the CEO of Astronomer... but I think he might be in the midst of that awakening himself.

---

The Frequency Shows

This is the kind of presence I lead with—not because I’ve mastered it, but because I’ve earned it through practice.

I'm writing this out because I’ve learned that gratitude is a choice that recalibrates power. Mine. Yours. Ours.

In this season of noise, distraction, and crumbling facades, it’s easy to think the most powerful voice is the loudest one, but sometimes, the most powerful energy in the room is the one that chooses to stay. To clean up the mess not with spite, but with understanding that there is wisdom living in every crack. My son gained confidence, and I gained wisdom. My oldest witnessed patience.

Gratitude isn't always "I'm grateful for you, I'm grateful for this food, this house, this community". Often times it means being grateful for being in the middle of a trench, not as a masochist but as someone who knows that wisdom and level ups are coming on the other side. Gratitude requires an eagle's eye view, and also no view at all. It requires openness and devotion. It's a freefall that sometimes begins with a dozen broken eggs.

---

I went through some shit this week.

In that shit, I quite often had to remind myself that everything is an opportunity for something, and this week the opportunity was for expansion in capacity, in awareness, all while holding gratitude for the process.