The Most Uncomfortable Sentence I’ve Sat With This Year

When life feels hollow, this is usually what’s missing

6 min read

Just now

I was scanning the page when one sentence reached out and grabbed my sleeve.

My first reaction was immediate and physical: No. That can’t be right. I felt my shoulders tense, my jaw tighten, my inner lawyer leap to attention.

My instinct was to reject it. But I respected the person who wrote it. And mature thinking knows when to pause instead of protest. It sits with it. So instead of swiping past, I carried the sentence with me on my daily walk.

I argued with it. Poked holes in it. Tried to put it back where it belonged. But slowly, against my will, it began rearranging the furniture in my mind. By the time I got home, I realised it had given me a practice I didn’t know I was missing.

I want to share it with you. My guess is you’ll react exactly as I did. If you do. Stay with me.

It’ll be worth it.

The idea that felt harmless until it wasn’t

The troubling sentence was this:

Gratitude is the foundation of all virtue.

I’d always filed gratitude away as a harmless happiness habit. Something self-help gurus…