Choosing Gratitude for the Hand I Was Dealt

Sometimes shit happens and you get dealt a bad hand. I’ve been dealt a few of them in my life. But being a wildcard has never been about controlling the cards I’m dealt. It’s about deciding how I’m going to play them.

An acronym I coined that has helped push me through times of discomfort is remembering L.A.U.G.H. (Love, Absolution, Understanding, Gratitude, and Hope) Gratitude is the state that is sometimes the most difficult to generate. It’s really easy to fixate on the things that don’t serve you then remind yourself of the things that do. And it took some time for me to feel gratitude for what was shared with the audience of Alone, because I was so fixated on what wasn’t. 

There is so much you never saw in terms of the things I made. You never saw my basecamp, where I had enough firewood stocked for weeks in a lean to. You didn’t see the sawhorse I built without cordage that could hold my entire body weight, my anvil, the hooks I created to hang my tools, my admittedly half assed chair, and the ladder I built to reach my food cache, a log that locked into two neighboring trees. You didn’t see many of my fishing systems, the trotline stretched across the crescent of my shoreline, the various fishing poles, reels, and lures I made from buttons, or the constant experimentation that went into holding my snare loops open with horsetail and strands of hair. 

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