The root of joy is gratefulness…
It is not joy that makes us grateful;
it is gratitude that makes us joyful.
Brother David Steindl Rast
All day today I felt more richly blessed than usual, almost to the point of starting to think I did not deserve it. But I did not go there. Unworthiness was for a long time my why of crapping on my own joy. It’s so easy too. Thinking “this is too good to be true” or “this can’t last” or “when is the other shoe going to drop” are all types of thinking that often become a self fulfilling prophecy. What I pay attention to, I give energy to and make it stronger.
Intentionally paying more attention to being grateful has been a healthy way of finding more worthiness. Oh, yes my old monsters “not good enough”, “don’t measure up” and “too many mistakes” are very much alive. However, the longer gratitude has been a practice the more pigmy size those little demons have become; still with me but too small to do much damage most of the time.
Cultivating a level of thankfulness that is life changing is difficult when it has not been one’s way in the past. Well I know the white knuckled battles I had to fight with my old ways of seeing and thinking. Based on my experience I can promise that gratitude does bring a pay off and can change one’s view of life to be richer, deeper and even profound.
It’s the outside borders of gratefulness that seem to pay the biggest dividends: grief, pain and heartache on one side balanced with little things like a cup of coffee, a sunrise or a toddler playing on the other. Being grateful for the awful and thankful for the small are the deepest roots of my happiness today.
Be thankful for what you have;
you’ll end up having more.
If you concentrate on what you don’t have,
you will never, ever have enough.
Oprah Winfrey
If I had my life to live over, I would have talked less and listened more.
In order to have a successful relationship
Through sickness, good health, international travel, a grueling career and many days of ordinary life, for well over two years I consistently put something fresh here daily. Some of the deepest and most emotional happenings of my life have been openly shared since my first entry into this blog on April 25, 2011. It was a “Higher Power” thing from the beginning, as I simply woke up one morning and knew I was supposed to “blog” about gratitude and build a closer relationship with being thankful.
The pain love can cause is legendary. The joy love can bring is even better documented in the annals of time. A thousand years ago or now, a message of true love reads the same.
Good Morning Gratitude 