Are you a grateful person? Gratitude does not come easy for many of us. If you are like me, you may find yourself prone to think, “What have you done for me lately, Lord?” But I am learning to cultivate a grateful heart. And this is essential to the experience of joy. Thankfulness and joy go hand in hand.
To be sure, the world has much that is wrong with it, but we also find an abundance of goodness and beauty. One simple practice that can help us become more grateful is to wake up giving thanks for five things each morning. Let’s list just a few of the things for which we can give thanks. We can be thankful for:
- A night of restful sleep
- A new day
- Food and drink
- Friends and family
- Our life and breath this day
- A measure of good health (even when we have aches and pains)
- Shelter and warmth and safety
- Work that we can do
- Play that we can enjoy, exercise
- An act of kindness by a stranger
- The sunshine and rain
- The earth with all its abundance
- The beauty of the trees and plants (how many shades of green in your neighborhood?)
- The sky, the clouds, the changing seasons
Can you add a few more?
This is just a sampling. Each day brings many occasions to rejoice and give thanks if we take notice. Let yourself be surprised by a kind word, a meaningful conversation, a beautiful scene, the taste of food, a job well done. Our days can be interesting and exciting if we take notice and mark these things as gifts.
If we only dwell on the negative things that happen to us during any given day, we will be left with a spirit of ungratefulness, which will surely rob us of our joy. It is easy to fall into a mindset of entitlement, that we deserve better. In this case we will rarely be truly satisfied or happy.
Rather, we must come to a realization that all of life is a gift: my breath, my life, my mind, my body, my health, and this amazingly good earth that we freely inhabit. Then we will become grateful people, bursting with joy.
Of course, this does not mean we should be oblivious to the sadness and suffering of others. We may also find joy in weeping with those who weep, but we will come to that later.
George Herbert, the 17th century English poet, has expressed it so well in his poem, “Gratefulness”:
We will have much more to say about gratefulness. Come back next time for another taste of this important “friend of joy.”