A Story About Choosing Gratitude

I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT A FRIEND I MET THIS WEEK. HER NAME IS NONO.

We met outside a Taco Truck in Venice. She initiated the conversation, asking for some change. I continued the conversation, buying her some dinner.

As we waited for her meal, she told me about herself. How she used to always judge people like her. But what she’s learned is that sometimes you’re actually only a few unfortunate events away from finding yourself in a place you never thought you’d be. For her, this was the death of her father, a global pandemic, and the lost of her job. A triple whammy that quickly escalated to what she thought was rock bottom — life on the streets.

Yet, despite her circumstance, she shared with me that she wouldn’t trade going through this hardship for the world. Because out of the death of her father, came reconciliation with her mother. And reconciliation led to forgiveness. Forgiveness to hope. And hope, led her back into the loving arms of a mother she thought she had lost.

Here, in poverty and pain, she also found a new form of gratitude. A deep gratitude for all people. She learned what it meant to come face to face with another. To really see them, not just look past them. She had tapped into a new capacity for love. A capacity that at one point didn’t seem possible or even necessary.

NoNo taught me that when you hit rock bottom, you can choose anger or you can fight to find gratitude. I’m finding gratitude to be a key ingredient behind someone’s strength. An ingredient to overcoming impossible things and to finding joy despite circumstances.

I left NoNo with a hug, some grateful tears, and an Ordinary Miracle in hand, “See you later, my friend.”