Imagine that you’re stranded on a desert island. You’re lying on the warm sand, but you’re beginning to feel hungry. Alas, the only edible plants are on the other side of the island, but to get to them you have to climb really tall trees with prickly thorns or cross lakes with stinging fish. It will take you a full day’s journey to get there, and you don’t know what other dangers you could encounter along the way and if you’ll be equipped to overcome them… “I don’t really need to eat,” you begin to convince yourself.

On Monday night I gave a talk called Train Your Brain To Look For The Good: The Science of Gratitude as part of the Mindful Dinner Series I curate for V Stars and Brilliantly Blissful Beings. In my talk I mentioned that entitlement is an obstacle to cultivating a grateful mindset; when we feel we are owed something, it doesn’t occur to us to be thankful for it.

“There’s an objective reality and a subjective reality,” he contested adamantly. I heard in his voice his desire to convince, but his eyes revealed a plea: prove me wrong they said.

“Right. So how can you ever really know something?” I asked with a look of obfuscation.

“Well, that’s just it. You can’t.”

I’ve recently started working with a lovely eleven year old boy. He is pensive, kind, and caught right in the eye of the storm—deciphering his place in the world. His mom reached out to me because he’s mentioned a few times already that he wishes he was dead.

Last night I attended a Workshop with Words with one of my favorite local wordsmiths: Bravo Child. The workshop was directed towards artists with an interest in poetry, specifically spoken word. I’ve been entertaining the thought of creating and practicing a few spoken word performances pieces after I found myself writing a poem about perfectionism on a plane recently. So I went along, eager to learn as much as I can from a man in pink and orange glasses who has strung words together so beautifully they make my eyes bleed saline.

“It’s no Niagara Falls, but it’s still nice.”

That statement, offered jovially and on some level intended to express appreciation, had the effect of extracting me from the wonder of the moment – the smell of the crisp, clean rainforest air, the sound of the water rushing down the falls, and bright green color of the trees surrounding the falls. With the utterance of that innocuous comment, I was instantly transported from the Blue Mountains in NSW Australia to Canada. Not physically of course (I haven’t figured out how to teleport yet) but mentally.