It’s easy to be thankful when things are going well, even if we sometimes need to be reminded how lucky we are and not to take things for granted.
It’s harder to be thankful when things are not going so well and we are struggling with finances, relationships and inner demons.
And then there’s that place in between, where things are actually pretty good, but we’re caught in the gap between our expectations and what’s actually going on. Maybe we feel badly that we haven’t been able to reproduce the Norman Rockwell portrait of a happy family sitting around a table smiling. Maybe we are far from our families and nostalgic for better times. Perhaps we decided to invite people over for Thanksgiving dinner and all but a few had other plans so we felt abandoned and rejected. Perhaps you are alone – a stranger in a strange land and you weren’t invited anywhere and perhaps you received multiple invitations and got all twisted up inside trying to avoid hurting this one’s feelings and honoring how you really wanted to spend the day.
What if we could separate gratitude from the object of our thanks. What if grateful were a state of being, inseparable from who we are; a quality that we exuded from the inside out. What if everything we encountered were automatically bathed in its’ light?
What if gratitude were not a reaction we had to something that we have labeled good or desirable but something we brought to the party no matter what?
What if gratitude were like kindness or beauty – a quality of being that we could cultivate. Instead of facials or massages we could keep gratitude journals, find something to appreciate in everyone we meet and tell them about it, meditate, pray for our hearts to be filled with appreciation and starting with our own breathe move over our bodies: thank you feet for carrying us this far (even if they hurt), thank our eyes for being the windows to the world (even with our glasses) and to our souls and our amazing pump of a heart for keeping our blood oxygenated and circulating – just for starters. if we really got going here the list would be endless and….. that’s just the point.
If you were a grateful person, how would I know? How would you show up differently? Happy for sure – because gratitude and joy are inseparable first cousins; enthusiastic about everything – the people we meet, the sunsets we see, the rainbows that wow us almost daily at this time of year as well as the tougher situations that help us grow, humble us and remind us of the resiliance and fragility of our shared human condition.
We get so caught up in having and doing, especially over the holidays and what we leave out is being. Instead of have, do, be – I’m switching the formula around to Be, Do, Have.
Be gratitude, Do what someone who is grateful for everything would do and I guarantee that the having will take care of itself.
Whatever is going on in your life, take a few minutes today and everyday to water your inner quality of gratitude. You’ll feel it. The people in your life will feel it and the world will be a better place because of you.
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