Giving Thanks. M. J. Ryan
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Can you see the holiness in those things you take for granted—a paved road or a
washing machine? If you concentrate on finding what is good in every situation,
you will discover that your life will suddenly be filled with gratitude, a feeling
that nurtures the soul.
—Rabbi Harold Kushner
One of the incredible truths about gratitude is that it is impossible to feel both
the positive emotion of thankfulness and a negative emotion such as anger or fear
at the same time. Gratitude births only positive feelings—love, compassion, joy,
and hope. As we focus on what we are thankful for, fear, anger, bitterness simply
melt away, seemingly without effort.
How can this be? The answer is that gratitude helps us track success and the
brain naturally works to track success. If you have ever watched a baby learn
something, you’ll know what I mean. Learning to walk, for example, she stands
and puts out one foot. Boom! Down she goes because her balance wasn’t right.
Instead of castigating herself for blowing it, getting angry, or blaming the floor or
her shoe, she just registers that it didn’t work and tries again.
As we get older, however, we get schooled in our mistakes, and learn to focus
on what’s lacking, missing, inadequate, and painful. That’s why gratitude is so
powerful. It helps us to return to our natural state of joyfulness where we notice
what’s right instead of what’s wrong. Gratitude reminds us to be like plants,
which turn toward, not away, from the light.
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Joy is prayer—Joy is strength—Joy is love—Joy is a net of love by which you can
catch souls. She gives most who gives with joy.
—Mother Teresa
I don’t know about you, but in general, there hasn’t been a lot of joy, that open-
ing and swelling of the heart, in my life. It wasn’t because of my circumstances,
because they weren’t particularly hard, but because of my mental training. Like so
many of us, I was busy climbing the ladder of success, and took no time to enjoy
the journey. I was too busy getting on to the next challenge. But I got sick and
tired of a joyless existence, and so have thought a lot in the past few years about
how to bring more joy into my life. The more I think about it, the more I believe
that joy and gratitude are inseparable. Joy is defined by the dictionary as an
“emotion evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune or by the prospect of
possessing what one desires,” while gratitude is that “state of being appreciative
of benefits received.” In other words, whenever we are appreciative, we are filled
with a sense of well-being and swept up by the feeling of joy.
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Begin today. Declare out loud to the Universe that you are willing to let go of
struggle and eager to learn through joy.
—Sarah Ban Breathnach
Want to feel more joyful? Take a moment right now to think of all that you have
accomplished today and celebrate each feat, no matter its size.You feel better,
even if only a little bit, right? The more we pay attention to our successes and
accomplishments, the more success we can create. And we’ll view life as a grand
adventure that we’re willing to show up for rather than a series of tedious tasks
to be crossed off or endured.
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The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Young children are such exuberant, joy-filled creatures, eager to embrace life
in all its mystery and majesty. Everything is new, exciting, a gift—a bubble, a
snowflake, a mud puddle. But something in the process of growing up so often
takes the juice out of us.We become encrusted, hard, jaded. We lose our joy, our
exuberance, our passionate embrace of life.We trudge instead of skip, retreat
instead of explore, “too old for that,” whatever “that” is.
This drying up is so common that when we meet a vibrant, joy-filled older
person, he or she stands out as a singular exception. But we don’t have to lose
the happiness or juiciness of youth. All we need to do is to tap into our sense
of gratitude, for when we do, we are like little children again, seeing the world
for the first time.
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Gratitude is the fairest blossom which springs from the soul.
—Henry Ward Beecher
In Simple Pleasures of the Garden, Dawna Markova shares a story about a woman who
has kept her attitude of gratitude alive: “Several years ago, I was walking in March
along a gravel road that led to the ocean in Rhode Island. A very old and thin
woman came hobbling down a driveway toward me. I waved and continued
walking, but as I passed, she grabbed my arm, turned around and began to pull
me in the direction of her house. I instantly thought of the witch in Hansel and
Gretel, and tried to pull back, but that only made her clutch tighter around my
wrist. Besides, she didn’t cackle, so I relented.
“She didn’t say a word, in fact, until we approached her house: a shingle-
style cottage with green shutters and a front lawn erupting everywhere in purple
crocuses. She released me there, throwing her arms up in the air and shouting,
‘Look at this splendor! Isn’t it a miracle?!’”
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Mental sunshine will cause the flowers of peace, happiness, and prosperity to
grow upon the face of the Earth. Be a creator of mental sunshine.
—graffition a wall in Berkeley, California
Gratitude makes us feel good because it helps us widen our frame of vision.
Under depression or stress, we can develop tunnel vision, seeing only this prob-
lem, that difficulty.We can get overtaken by a heavy, dark feeling of despair. But
when we experience a sense of gratitude, we give ourselves a dose of mental
sunshine. Suddenly the world seems brighter, and we have more options.
And the greatest thing is that as we experience the mental sunshine of
gratitude, we begin to glow with sunshine ourselves. Suddenly not only is the
world brighter, but we are too. Soon we notice that our lives are full of people
who want to be