When I was in my late twenties and early thirties, I often had the feeling that something wasn’t quite right. I couldn’t always explain it. There was a restlessness, a sense that something was off, even though I could look around my life and see plenty to be grateful for.
That was part of what made it so confusing. If I had so much, what exactly was my problem?
There is a story I have shared before that stayed with me for years. In Russell Conwell’s Acres of Diamonds, a man sells his farm and goes searching for diamonds. The person who buys the property later discovers diamonds on the land the man has left behind. Read the story.
The story haunted me. I wondered whether I was doing the same thing: looking for something elsewhere when everything I needed was already right in front of me. Perhaps my restlessness meant that I simply didn’t appreciate what I had.
I had somehow managed to turn a story about diamonds into another reason to question myself.
There is value in noticing what is already good in our lives. I still believe that. But the conclusion I drew about myself made it difficult to consider anything else. Once I decided I might be ungrateful, the feeling became something I needed to correct before I had really understood it.
What eventually helped was allowing the restlessness to be there and continuing to explore it, even when I questioned whether I should. I experimented. I tried things. I began asking whether there was something I wanted to do, or whether some of what I was feeling had to do with boundaries. There were several things to understand, and they became clearer over time.
I wish I could tell you that I worked it all out promptly. It took me a while.
There were still times when I wondered whether I was being ungrateful. But as I kept exploring, I came to recognize that my restlessness had reasons. Appreciating my life and wanting to understand what felt off could exist together.
Sue Monk Kidd describes a related experience in When the Heart Waits. Writing about a period of spiritual discontent in midlife, she recalls becoming aware of parts of herself that had not found expression. Her account offers a way to consider the questions that can arise within a familiar life, before we know what they will mean. Read Kidd’s excerpt.
For me, that distinction matters. A feeling can deserve attention while its meaning is still unclear. We can take it seriously without assuming we already know what it is asking of us.
Perhaps you recognize something of this in your own life. You love your family and want more time that belongs to you. You value the work you do and wonder about an interest you have barely explored. You appreciate being someone others rely on and feel uncomfortable with how readily your availability is assumed.
The gratitude is real. So is the question that keeps returning.
BrenĂ© Brown’s Atlas of the Heart offers another useful companion to this conversation. Brown emphasizes how finding more accurate words for our emotions and experiences can help us understand and communicate them. Explore the book’s reading resources.
That gives me a useful question to bring to restlessness: what am I actually feeling? “Something is off” may be the best description available at first. With time, we might recognize longing, frustration, uncertainty, or a mixture that changes with the circumstances. “I’m ungrateful” can close that exploration before it has much chance to begin.
My own experience taught me to be more curious about the feelings that seemed to contradict the life I thought I should be satisfied with. Sometimes I discovered something I wanted to explore. Sometimes I had questions about how I was living or relating to others. Understanding one part did not immediately explain everything else.
This week on The Damselfly Path, we’re exploring tension and contradiction: the parts of an experience that don’t fit easily together. Gratitude and restlessness are one example. We can appreciate what is here and still acknowledge what feels missing, difficult, or unfinished.
If this feels familiar, perhaps there is a question worth spending a little time with:
What have I been dismissing as ingratitude that I haven’t yet given myself room to understand?
Joanne đŸ’—
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