AN ATTITUDE OF GRATITUDE

“It is in our later years that we are often able to give our most meaningful consideration to values, to refocusing our priorities, shifting our outlook and developing a sense of gratitude for the richness of life.”
Connie Goldman & Richard Mahler, Secrets of Becoming a Late Bloomer, Hazelden Foundation (c) 1995

Self-help gurus have lectured to us about gratitude for years now. How much more harping are we willing to endure before we take their advice to heart? They’re right, you know. Gratitude for even the smallest of things can magically shift a tough day from gray to sunny bright just like that!

Case in point: I wake up mopey, eyes crusty, hair sticking up at right angles the result of a crummy nights sleep (post-menopausal night sweats, husband snoring cat jumping on my feet, etc.). Groaning, I slither out of bed. Bare-footed and bone stiff I slog across the icy kitchen floor, reach for the coffee pot realizing as I lift it that I’d forgotten to set it up the night before. Now I must endure the noisy coffee bean grinder, put the coffee into the filter, water up to the line. Eyes glued to the machine I am waiting three weeks for the damn java to trickle down too slowly. The day is about to begin and I desperately need my sanity, my caffeine. There is no joy in my life at this moment.

Just then I remember the self-help gurus and decide to “do gratitude” while I wait. I decide, to focus on the positive like author Ruth Turk who wrote “To my amazement, I continue to find each decade of my lifetime more rewarding and exciting than the preceding ones.” (The Second Flowering, page 47, New Win Publishing, Clinton, NJ 1993) So let’s see---I’m grateful I have a husband (snoring and all), I’m grateful I have a house and warm bed to sleep in, I’m grateful for my sticky kitchen floor and I’m grateful the floor is cold because it reminds me that I’ve forgotten my slippers (which I go back to the bedroom to retrieve and which I’m very grateful I have!). I’m grateful for my coffee maker and the aroma of fresh beans. I’m thankful for the nose that enables me to smell the coffee brewing. And I am ever so grateful for the cup of coffee I am now putting to my lips as my brain begins to fill the empty space in my skull.

Got the idea? You can spend the day grousing because you forgot why you walked into the livingroom or you can be grateful for the legs that got you there.