“Show me an ungrateful person and I’ll you a selfish person.”
Hannah T. K.
It is a staggering thought that if you are not currently or regularly grateful, you are dealing with a case of acute self-absorption and pride. If you have not thought or expressed gratitude within the last couple of hours, you could use a dose of reflection on what you perceive your role to be in your own universe. Like the proverbial 3 year-old, almost all of us harbor the thought, maybe even sub-consciously, that we are the most important person in our universe. After all, if we didn’t exist, life would be over, right? Wrong!
The reason I don’t notice that someone held a door open for me, or slowed down to let me in in traffic is either because I am distracted or I am entitled. The former is excusable based on circumstances. The latter is abominable. Many of us have worked incredibly hard to get where we are in life but we may forget that there are others who work infinitely harder than we ever will and may never attain to what we have. Let us also not forget that despite our greatest efforts, our successes ride on the shoulders of others, past and current, who poured and continue to pour into our lives. It is a short step from taking things for granted to being entitled.
The benefits of gratitude and boundless to our physical, spiritual, and emotional selves. It infuses life and vitality. The harm done by ingratitude is equally incalculable to the ungrateful person. Those who have to be around that person soon feel drained and sucked dry – physically, spiritually, and emotionally. May we strive to be thankful people and to be reputed as such. May we aspire to be annoyingly thankful. May we be thankful for big things, and for small things, for really, there are no big or small things. Our thanks need to be expressed verbally and in actions. Aim to make your verbalization of thanks deliberate, heart-felt, a sacred moment; not flippant or glib.
The antithesis of gratefulness is expressed in chronic grumbling, murmuring, complaining, frustration, and, worse, in put-downs and disappointments in others. These can be against ourselves, our loved ones, strangers, the government, and on and on. These soon become habits, then a way of life that defines us.
Visualize a gratefulness meter on a continuum – with ungratefulness on the left and gratitude on the right. Make an honest assessment of yourself or ask those who walk life with you where you are on the scale. Make it your goal to slide further and further to the right every day, and so increase your GQ – your gratitude quotient. Thank God and people for
for who and what they are, for what they do, and that they are. Thank the same person – your spouse, your kids, – for the same thing you’ve thanked them for. Open your eyes to something new to thank them for. Thank a person you’ve never thanked before. If you feel a complaint creeping up, rewire your brain by coming up with something positive to be thankful for. If you can’t think of it, keep your mouth shut, unless you can express the complaint constructively and offer helpful solutions.
A grateful person recognizes that they are the fortunate recipient of innumerable and constant blessings. They live in an incessant state of awe and awareness of the beauty and the bounty around them, even in hardships, sometimes because of their hardships. They no longer take things for granted, indeed every experience and interaction, even the most mundane, becomes sacrosanct.
Be that person.
“Thankfulness is a habit that will grow us as a human being; a habit that we can start immediately, and practice for the rest of our lives.”
Hannah Kolehmainen