Hello friends and welcome to my 99th blog.
Today I am feeling grateful.
I have spoken about giving thanks and gratitude in previous blogs, and quite often. This is a very important part of my life, but I have to be honest and say, that at times I do not feel grateful. I have umpteen things for which I “ought” to be grateful but there are days when I am not.
More recently it would seem that gratitude and feeling grateful has gone from a very meaningful state to a one of the many hashtags with many memes and overused quotes that we see all over social media. It’s as though we are being told what we should do, how we should feel, and the experiences that we ought to be having. A little too prescriptive for my liking and really not very realistic at all.
I understood completely that, subsequent to Covid, we all felt that we needed to be more grateful, more mindful and more authentic, especially the fortunate ones who had not experienced loss and awful times during the pandemic. Indeed, most of us do have a great deal to be thankful for, and the multitude of benefits of gratitude have been well documented and studied for years. However, my feeling is that we all have a choice, and it’s up to us to decide how we want to live our lives and what works for us.
That being said, most of us, in our heart of hearts, want to strive towards being as happy and contented as possible. In order to achieve this, and, if acknowledging our blessings can lead to this, surely it would be awesome to aim for this state of being? I certainly do.
I think the difficulty lies in how we go about being grateful.
Perhaps, it’s about acknowledging that life is not perfect, and never will be, and its about knowing where we are in our lives and how we are doing. I believe that self-awareness plays an enormous role in establishing this and maintaining this on an ongoing basis. Whew, this is not an easy one, for me, by any stretch of the imagination.
I also believe that I have to be careful of using gratitude as a crutch. It’s wonderful to be grateful and thankful, as long as I am not using this to avoid the issues in my life and the problems that I might be having. Feelings of gratitude may be a foil for me: I convince myself that I am beyond blessed, while knowing that there is something or someone in my life, who or that is fundamentally making me unhappy. Deep, but true, and quite hard to confront.
This brings me to the whole balance story again. Why does this word seem to crop up in so many of my blogs? What I should aim to do is to be grateful for what I have, but at the same time to recognize and honour what I need, and to establish the difference between the two. Shoo, perhaps I am growing up, after all.
What is also dawning on me, is the fact that I do not have the right to expect others to feel the same about gratitude, kindness, eating to live or any of my missions. It is not my place to say to others how they can learn to be grateful, or kind or to eat to optimize their health and wellness. I have never walked one step in their shoes, and I need to respect that their life is theirs and theirs alone. Obviously if they ask my advice, and truly want to explore this, that is great, but it’s not right for me to just stand on my soap box and sprout my ideals and aims to all and sundry. My thoughts about this do come from a place of kindness mostly, and I am on a quest to help others, but only if this is what they really want.
Getting back to me feeling grateful today. It’s a good day and I feel blessed. This does not mean that I will feel permanently grateful from here on. Tomorrow I may not and that is fine.
What I am learning is that this gratitude is like all the tools in my “aiming to live my best life” toolbox. It is an awesome tool at times, but may not necessarily be at others. In the same vein, my breathwork which serves as my meditation may be the very thing that gets me to sleep some nights, when I awaken in the wee hours of the morning, whereas at other times it is a dismal failure. Similarly my rainbow veggies and not drinking the dreaded coke zero happens a lot of the time, but not all of the time. There are so many other tools which I could employ, but I don’t wish to bore you.
The bottom line, and I really hope this blog has not been totally confusing for you all, is that for me, it is superbly awesome to be grateful and feel gratitude, so I would like to explore ways in which i might be able to do this. Some may resonate with you.
- A daily journal documenting the things you are grateful for. This has not really worked for me. I write down my acts of kindness but there is little else I journal, about from my blogs.
- Self- compassion first, as mentioned above, then a moderate dose of gratitude. I am really doing so much better in this area.
- My acts of kindness do help me in being grateful for all that I have and am, mostly, and for this I am thankful.
- The power of the pause. This resonates with me one hundred percent, and I am trying really hard to use the pause as often as I can. In the same way, my active listening theme of the year is quite an asset to my feeling grateful. Even if I just appreciate the beauty that surrounds us. Honestly!
- Nurturing friendships make me feel beyond blessed. Especially when things aren’t going absolutely fantastically – this is the time that I realise the depth of the friendships that I am unbelievably lucky to have.
- A smile can be the most powerful and amazing thing. I wrote about smiling in a blog a long while ago. For me smiling and gratitude are synonymous with one another. The more I smile the more positive a response that I get, and the more I am grateful just for my life and to be alive – true words.
- If I mess up, sometimes afterwards, I feel thankful for what I have learnt and grateful to be in the position to learn.
This blog has been just a quick one, of thoughts that I have had today. There are many more ways in which we can learn to practice gratitude, but that has not been the point of this blog. I think you understand.
As I have said many times before, and am certain to say many times again, we are all so different. We have the freedom to choose what works for us. This gratitude story will look completely different for each person.
Please always remember that you are enough, more than enough. Be kind to you, always.
In the meantime I am just going to revel in being grateful.
Wishing you all a beautiful rest of week.