I Love My Life!

Focusing on gratitude this month has been such a blessing. For an entire month, I have thought about gratitude, looked for it, written about it, discussed it, read about it, investigated it, explored it, and found it over and over. As I have been living and breathing gratitude these last weeks, an amazing thing has happened. I have fallen in love with my life.

Sometimes I will just be going through my day, doing nothing special, and all of a sudden this feeling of almost giddy pleasure washes over me. I think, and sometimes even say out loud, “I love my life!” Sometimes I just shake my head in disbelief at the overwhelming abundance of blessings I have been graced with. My heart swells with such humbling gratitude that I think it might burst wide open like a pinata, and flowers and butterflies will pour forth until the world is covered in them.

Anne Lamott says that the two best prayers are “Help me, help me, help me,” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” I wonder if we would need the first prayer so much if we started with the second prayer and prayed it more often. Just a thought.

As some of you know, I lead a monthly discussion group on the 10 Steps. We have been focusing on one Step a month, as I have been on the blog. After our discussion earlier this month on gratitude, I received an email from someone in the group. I am quoting part of it here, with her permission.

Thursday I went downtown to have lunch with my daughter, and to take a package of hers home from her office in my car since she travels by bicycle. It was so crazy on the streets with construction etc., that I parked in a garage and we stopped by my car to drop off her package on our way to the food carts. In the parking garage I tripped on a curb and fell face first. I have a broken foot, in a cast, and an abraded face that scabbed up impressively after all the bleeding stopped. The punch line is, the first thing I said was (after "ow!") "I am so grateful that all of my teeth are intact, and that my glasses weren't damaged!"

It was a reflexive statement rather than considered, and then it took a couple days before I realized that I had been practicing the very thing we discussed in our group this month! Some staff at urgent care commented on my positive perspective, which was nice, but the real payoff has been that even though this is painful and very inconvenient, it has not stolen my happiness. So three cheers for our 10 steps to happiness and how to keep it!... This is my testimonial to show that #9 really does work in the face of adversity.

I was so pleased to hear that she was keeping her spirits up in spite of a painful and debilitating accident, and for me, it confirmed my own experience this month of having gratitude permeate my perspective on life.

So I would like to end this month with an exercise we did in our discussion group. We came up with a list of ways to remind ourselves to be grateful. Here are some of the ideas.

1. For one minute list things you are grateful for.
2. Set your screen on your phone or computer to show a gratitude reminder.
3. Set your phone to vibrate at set times as a reminder to be grateful.
4. Keep a picture of your kids (dog, boat, significant other, whatever works) where you can see it.
5. Use post it note reminders.
6. Meet regularly with a friend or a group to focus on gratitude.
7. Keep a running gratitude list that you add to every morning or every evening.
8. Notice things to be grateful for as you go through your day.
9. Share your gratitude with someone – tell someone what you are grateful for.
10. Say thank you to clerks, cashiers, servers, all the people who help you during your day.
11. Be generous with compliments.
12. Express gratitude and appreciation to children for their kind acts.
13. Say please and thank you.
14. Mention good service to a supervisor.
15. Recognize that it’s never too late to say thank you to someone, perhaps with an apology if appropriate.
16. Use a gratitude reminder as a password.
17. Give thanks before meals and before bedtime.
18. Look for ways to bring gratitude into conversation with others.
19. Keep a gratitude journal.
20. Put a small dry erase board on the fridge and jot down things you are grateful for. (The whole family can participate in this one.)

Would any of these be helpful to you? Do you have other ideas to add to the list?

This month would not be complete if I did not take this opportunity to say a huge thank you to all of you. I do so enjoy our interaction through reading each other’s blogs and comments. We might connect only through cyberspace, but the connection is real and meaningful to me. You enrich my life and I am grateful.

Namaste.