gratitude

Because I Will Make It So

/ James Browning

488273_471885792884874_632342651_nThere is a vitality,
a life force,
a quickening
that is translated through you into action,
and there is only one of you in all time,
this expression is unique,
and if you block it,
it will never exist through any other medium;
and be lost. The world will not have it.
It is not your business to determine how good it is,
not how it compares with other expression.
is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly,
to keep the channel open.
You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work.
You have to keep open and aware directly
to the urges that motivate you.
Keep the channel open.
No artist is pleased.
There is no satisfaction whatever at any time.
There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction,
a blessed unrest that keeps us marching
and makes us more alive than the others.
Martha Graham

Another new day; another gift I will not take for granted. Whatever there is for me to paint and sculpt out of this little piece of the hard rock of life, I will be grateful for it all. Every breath will have a silver lining of joy. Why? Because I will make it so.

Make your choice, adventurous Stranger,
Strike the bell and bide the danger,
Or wonder, till it drives you mad,
What would have followed if you had.
C.S. Lewis

My Imperfect Seeking

/ James Browning

shellResponse to the post here yesterday, “Stuck In the Labyrinth“, was much stronger than usual. Thank you for reading and for your re-posts! I suppose it is a commonality we all have: too much time spent thinking about the past and future when being well footed in the present would be a far better use of our energy. Just about all of us know that, but at least for me, practicing it is, at best, a highly inconsistent endeavor.  But earnest trying improves my life experience a lot.

Mostly as a reminder to myself to keep the “now” in as clear of a focus as I can, below are some leftovers from yesterday’s research.

We are living in a culture
entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time,
in which the so-called present moment
is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline
between an all-powerfully causative past
and an absorbingly important future.
We have no present.
Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied
with memory and expectation.
We do not realize that there never was,
is, nor will be any other experience than present experience.
We are therefore out of touch with reality.
We confuse the world as talked about,
described, and measured
with the world which actually is.
We are sick with a fascination
for the useful tools of names and numbers,
of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.
Alan Watts

When you understand… that what you’re telling is just a story… It isn’t happening anymore. When you realize the story you’re telling is just words, when you can just crumble up and throw your past in the trashcan… then we’ll figure out who you’re going to be. From “Invisible Monsters” Chuck Palahniuk

And, so I go into my day reminded again of the important of being firmly rooted in the “now”. To a level of 100% that is an impossible aspiration, yet it is my imperfect seeking that gives me more and more of the present to live in and be grateful for.

Gratitude looks to the Past
and love to the Present;
fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.
C.S. Lewis

 

A Beautiful Sunrise and Three Sayings

/ James Browning

beautiful-morning-sunrise-picture

saying 02 true,life,quote,message,dp,quotes-c2b13c7884590b329a3b5e0376c69f82_h

saying 01 7478356488_ba932da2d5_z

Be thankful for your allotment
in an imperfect world.
Though better circumstances
can be imagined,
far worse are nearer misses
than you probably care to realize.
Richelle E. Goodrich

The Gift of Not Getting

/ James Browning

tumblr_m1g6z25wl31rp4c9so1_500Trolling through my bookmarks and looking at pages saved as possible inspiration for this blog, I came across one called “List of Life Lessons”. Six hundred and forty individual posts are contained within the list that range from originally insightful to simple restatements of famous quotes. With no particular rhyme or reason, here are nine of them:

5. We regret more about the things we didn’t do than the things we did do. Get out of yourself and just do it. (Will W., 36)

6. Stop trying to impress people by being someone you’re not because in the end, you’ll lose yourself. (Anonymous)

7. We don’t have to do anything – we always have a choice. (Tim W., 38)

8. The best feeling in the world is getting paid to do what you love to do. (Laozhang, 36)

9. No one can make you feel anything you don’t want to. (Jennifer K., 28)

10. The older I get, the less I care about what others think of me. Therefore, the older I get, the more I enjoy life. (Michael M., 57)

11. The word “Family” rarely ends up meaning blood related, and usually ends up becoming who we allow them to be. (Celeste, 29)

12. The purpose of life is simply to live a life of purpose. With no reason to get up in the morning life can start to really get you down. Watch out retirees! Make sure you retire to something instead of from something. (Ricky K., 33)

13. If you have the choice to be right or kind, always pick kind! (Kate, 55)
http://www.motivationalwellbeing.com/life-lessons.html

Nothing earth shattering or any prize-winning authorship, yet good advice rarely appears that way. In its best form, wisdom is constructed in simple to read form and in words easily grasped. Being wise is rarely known best by the rich, powerful, highly educated or the well-known. Instead it is the thoughts of common people living average lives where the greatest understanding of life is to be found. When young I yearned to be famous, wealthy and renowned but have come to know what a curse that would have been. I am grateful for the gift of not getting that I once wanted.

It’s not what you look at that matters,
it’s what you see.
Henry David Thoreau

Today I Will Be Happy With Less.

/ James Browning

sobering grateful thought one

That’s just eleven words with a
sobering with truthful meaning.
“Today I will be happy with less”.

more….

sobering grateful thought two quote tecumseh

…Eleven words at the top and forty-seven more just above; fifty-eight words of absolute truth about one of the greatest secrets of a good life….

Soon to be two years I have found something to be grateful for each morning and focused on it for about an hour. There are no words that I can say to tell you of the conviction I have that practicing gratefulness is life changing. I urge you… no I beg you with all my heart, to take a little time for gratitude every day. Do it for just a month and you will never be the same again.

Happiness cannot be traveled to,
owned, earned, worn or consumed.
Happiness is the spiritual experience
of living every minute
with love, grace, and gratitude.
Denis Waitley

Live In the Layers, Not On the Litter

/ James Browning

59325Six hundred and fifty-seven days I have been here to post a thought, a photo or a borrowed contemplation about gratitude. Through business travel, vacations and even illness my faithfulness to my self-assigned daily task never wavered for over a year and nine months. Until yesterday… when travel problems invaded my unbroken string.

A return home from a business trip should have allowed arrival in my home city around 4pm, leaving close to eight hours to post a new installment of goodmorninggratitude. What happened instead was landing here at 2:30am the following morning after a long day of flight delays and cancellations. And so, I can not longer say “I haven’t missed a single day in almost two years”. And you know what? I am not bothered by it.

What I now realize is my goal of posting here each day had an element of “look at me”; “look what I can do” contained within. Yes, there was personal satisfaction to consistently post each day and that was the primary driving force (most of the time). But sometimes it was duty that brought words to my screen; that and little else. How long did I need to prove the point to myself that I could do this? A year? A year and a half? Even six months showed I could, but I became ‘hooked’ instead. The realities of life jumped up to teach me, with the greatest of intentions I had let my self assigned duty to post here become a ‘rut’; the very thing I was trying to avoid. As John Lennon wrote “Life is what happens, while you are making other plans”.

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being abides,
from which I struggle not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which the scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind,
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn.
I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered and I roamed through the wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice directed me:
-Live in the layers, not on the litter-
Though I lack the art to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
From “The Collected Poems” by Stanley J. Kunitz

My unbroken string of posts is broken and that’s just fine! It doesn’t bother me although I would have thought it would. Instead, I get a sense of relief knowing that missing a day or two here and there is of no consequence. Another life lesson taught unexpectedly is the subject for my gratitude this morning.

Our brightest blazes of gladness
are commonly kindled
by unexpected sparks.
Samuel Johnson

You Are Here Now

/ James Browning

tumblr_mb9ou0V4zm1rbvjfno1_500Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,
May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul.

As the wind loves to call things to dance,
May your gravity by lightened by grace.

Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth,
May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect.

As water takes whatever shape it is in,
So free may you be about who you become.

As silence smiles on the other side of what’s said,
May your sense of irony bring perspective.

As time remains free of all that it frames,
May your mind stay clear of all it names.

May your prayer of listening deepen enough
to hear in the depths the laughter of god.

“For Equilibrium, a Blessing”
From “To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings”
John O’Donohue

For the joy, laughter, grace, reverence, respect, freedom, perspective, time, freedom, clarity, love and every blessing of my life I have learned a gratitude in the last two years never before experienced. The more I acknowledge the gifts and express my thankfulness, the more of the good, wonderful and beautiful arrives.

I ask, “If life was always this uncomplicatedly simple why did it take me so long to see that?” The answer immediately echoes back “It does not matter, you are here now”.

Courage is the price
that life exacts
for granting peace.
Amelia Earhart

As Good As Any Moment In All Eternity

/ James Browning

Beautiful%20Wallpaper%2006Amazing things have begun happening in my life, so much so, at first I doubted what was occurring. How can it be a man could wish for so much and not recognize dreams coming true as they began arriving?

Since childhood I believed everything flowed from within me outward completely of my own volition; from my thoughts and hopes to be turned into reality by my own hands. It was out of my comprehension to believe my hopes could materialize without my active participation causing it.

Make no mistake, reservation and disbelief still race round and round me like marauders attacking a circled wagon train, but I am discovering believing in my dreams and that I deserve them is the strongest force toward manifesting them. When my hope becomes my certainty, what I have struggled to find for so very, very long has the opportunity to appear.

Logic and thought have been the enemy of my dreams. Hopes are not math problems to be solved. They are seeds planted and watered with patience and a faith in being deserving of the wish being granted. Some call it “manifesting your own destiny”. Others make reference to “the power of attraction”.

Religion would say my dreams appearing on the horizon is “God’s work”. And if that is true, it a Higher Power working through me, not for me. Simply I have passed the threshold of being able to use what has been within me all along; what “God” put in me to begin with. Great religions frequently mention this power inside. Few actually believe it exists and fewer still think they can find any harmony with it. No matter; inwardly it’s there just the same waiting for us all.

Label me a kook if you want, I don’t care. You can think I smoked too much pot in my youth and fried my brain, but it won’t matter one bit. And before you ask, I hardly drink, don’t do drugs and am not a mental patient. I’m just an ordinary person who has extraordinary things happening in his life from a source truly beyond my ability to fully comprehend. My life has not turned into some panacea; far from it. But mixed in with everyday trial and tribulation are authentic dreams, to my amazement, coming true. How does it happen? By believing in my hopes and that I deserve for them to come true, then letting go of trying to steer reality into bringing them to me. All I have to do is show up, live well and believe.

The scary part is dreams coming true require me to at times take action purely by instinct and feeling; doing things that I know I should do even though there is little to no logic to support my actions. It’s not easy and feels like jumping off a cliff uncertain if there’s a parachute on my back. When I believe, truly believe in my dreams, the chute is always there.

The universe does not shout at me to make dreams come true, it only nudges. I need only pay attention to that direction and follow through on what I am lead to do. (Even writing that I laugh out loud for I know how it sounds outlandish, but it’s TRUE!). It’s amazing what has begun happening for me now that I don’t try to control everything. I am deeply grateful to have discovered some of the greatest wisdom possible is “not knowing” and “not understanding” but doing anyway; it’s where dreams are found.

Every morning is a fresh beginning.
Every day is the world made new.
Today is a new day.
Today is my world made new.
I have lived all my life up to this moment,
to come to this day.
This moment, this day, is as good
as any moment in all eternity.
I shall make of this day
each moment of this day,
a heaven on earth.
This is my day of opportunity.
Dan Custer

A Precious Privilege

/ James Browning

michael-yamashita-landscape-travel (1)

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought,
and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder
is a quote by G.K. Chesterton I have personal proof of.

Gratefulness has a power to attract what I need and hope for; people from the past I lost but wanted to make contact with; money I needed arrived unexpectedly. With a grateful mind I sleep better; I am more productive; ALL my relationships are improved; life tastes better; I have more to look forward to. On and on to the point of near ad nauseam, beyond a doubt this has been proven to me in the last two years of writing here about gratitude every day.

Researchers in the field of gratitude, Psychologists Robert Emmons at the University of California at Davis, and Michael McCullough, at the University of Miami, have learned what I know without research: gratitude is really good for you.

In an experimental comparison Emmons and McCullough found people who take the time to keep a gratitude journal on a regular basis exercised more often, reported fewer physical issues, generally felt better about their lives, and were more optimistic about the upcoming week compared to those who kept track of hassles or neutral life events. Another benefit found was participants who kept gratitude lists were more likely to make progress toward important personal goals (academic, interpersonal and health-based).

Other Research has turned up physiological benefits of gratitude. It has been found when we think about someone or something we really appreciate and experience the feeling that goes with the thought, the parasympathetic – calming-branch of the autonomic nervous system – is triggered. This pattern when repeated brings a protective effect to the heart. The electromagnetic heart patterns of volunteers tested become more coherent and ordered when they activated feelings of appreciation.

There is evidence that when we practice bringing attention to what we appreciate in our lives, more positive emotions emerge. In a sort of positive pyramid effect, the more I pause to appreciate and show caring and compassion, the more order and coherence I experience internally.

Thank goodness research on gratitude has now challenged the idea of a “set point” for happiness. It was previously accepted that just as our body has a set point for weight, each person probably had a genetically determined level of happiness. Once upon a time I bought into that and believed since I suffered from moderate depression at times, I was doomed to have a set point of lowered happiness. Research on gratitude now suggests that people can move their set point upward to some degree, enough to have a measurable effect on both their outlook and their health. This works. My altered for the better state of mind is proof.

Emmons and McCullough said the following to their research subjects:
Cultivate a sense of gratitude’’ means that you make an effort to think about the many things in your life, both large and small, that you have to be grateful about. These might include particular supportive relationships, sacrifices or contributions that others have made for you, facts about your life such as your advantages and opportunities, or even gratitude for life itself, and the world that we live in. In all of these cases you are identifying previously unappreciated aspects of your life, for which you can be thankful.

Over a hundred and fifty years ago Ralph Waldo Emerson knew this when he wrote, the invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

A metaphor for my experience of focusing on gratitude is comparing it to exercise and physically work out. If I had spent an hour or more EVERY day for over a year and a half working out and getting exercise, I would be in the best physical condition of my life. The level of happiness I have and the belief I have in the future good that will come to me are at “body-builder” levels. Gratitude is the magic “supplement” that has made it so.

When you arise in the morning,
think of what a precious privilege
it is to be alive, to breathe, to think,
to enjoy, to love; then make that day count!
From “Life, the Truth and Being Free: by Steve Maraboli

Carry on, Santa, it’s Christmas Day, all secure…

/ James Browning

MilitaryXmasReadily I admit I fought through watery eyes to get this retyped here. Though I did not serve in the military, I have known many good men and women who did. While the poem was written specifically by a Marine for Marines, I have placed it here as a tribute to all military men and women, past and present. I honor and thank you. By your efforts I am able to celebrate Christmas quietly and without fear.

“Merry Christmas, My Friend”
T’was the night Before Christmas, he lived all alone,
In a one bedroom house made of plaster and stone.

I had come down the chimney with presents to give
and to see just who in this home did live.

I looked all about, a strange sight did I see,
no tinsel, no presents, not even a tree,
No stockings by the mantle, just boots filled with sand,
On the wall hung pictures of a far distant land.

With medals and badges, awards of all kinds,
a sobering thought soon came to my mind.
For this house was different, unlike any I’d seen,
This was the home of a U.S. Marine.

I heard stories about them, I had to see more
so I walked down the hall and pushed open the door.
And there he lay sleeping, silent, alone,
Curled up on the floor in his one-bedroom home.

He seemed so gentle, his face so serene,
Not how I pictured a U.S. Marine.
Was this the hero, of whom I’d just read,
Curled up in his poncho, a floor for his bed?

His head was clean-shaven, his weathered face tan,
I soon understood this was more than a man.
For I realized the families that I saw that night
owed their lives to these men, who were willing to fight.

Soon around the Nation, the children would play,
And grown-ups would celebrate on a bright Christmas day.
They all enjoyed freedom, each month and all year,
because of Marines like this one lying here.

I couldn’t help wonder how many lay alone
on a cold Christmas Eve, in a land far from home.
Just the very thought brought a tear to my eye
I dropped to my knees and I started to cry.

He must have awoken, for I heard a rough voice,
“Santa, don’t cry, this life is my choice.
I fight for freedom, I don’t ask for more.
My life is my God, my country, my Corps.”

With that he rolled over, drifted into sleep
I couldn’t control it, I continued to weep.

I watched him for hours, so silent and still
I noticed he shivered from the cold nights chill.
I took off my jacket, the one made of red,
and I covered this Soldier from his toes to his head.
Then I put on his T-shirt of scarlet and gold,
with an eagle, globe and anchor emblazoned so bold.
And although it barely fit me, I began to swell with pride,
and for one shining moment, I was Marine Corps deep inside.

I didn’t want to leave him so quiet in the night,
this guardian of honor so willing to fight.
But half asleep he rolled over and in a voice clean and pure,
said, “Carry on, Santa, it’s Christmas Day, all secure.”
One look at my watch and I knew he was right
Merry Christmas my friend, Semper Fi and good night.

Although attributed to many and often amended, what I have included here is the original poem in its original form written by James M. Schmidt in 1986. In December 2002, he set the record straight about the poem’s origin when he wrote “The true story is that while a Lance Corporal serving as Battalion Counter Sniper at the Marine Barracks 8th and I, Washington, DC, under Commandant P.X. Kelly and Battalion Commander D.J. Myers, I wrote this poem to hang on the door of the Gym in BEQ. When Colonel Myers came upon it, he read it and immediately had copies sent to each department at the Barracks and promptly dismissed the entire battalion early for Christmas leave. The poem was placed that day in the Marine Corps Gazette, distributed worldwide and later submitted to Leatherneck Magazine”.

Please share this blog with others in honor of our veterans and soldiers.

From the bitter cold winter at Valley Forge,
to the mountains of Afghanistan and the deserts of Iraq,
our soldiers have courageously answered when called,
gone where ordered, and defended our nation with honor.
Solomon Ortiz