I’m grateful for many things every day. And over the previous 542 blogs a number of themes have emerged as I’ve written. Sometimes it’s gratitude for the practice itself—the daily ritual of sitting down and reflecting on the blessings that surround and infuse my life every single day. I gain such value from the simple exercise of exploring the experiences of a given day and from that selecting one or two things that I want to publicly express gratitude for. During the course of a day something will happen or I’ll see something beautiful or I will have an interaction with a person and my heart floods with thankfulness. Often by the end of the day I don’t even write about half the things I that occur throughout it.
Tonight is one for simple gratitude—this is one of those nights when I don’t have anything particularly profound to say other than to express my thanks for simple, everyday things.
I am grateful for everyone who reads or has read this blog at least once. You are a large reason why I keep writing. I am not famous—I don’t have dozens of followers on Twitter and hundreds of people who read this blog on a daily basis. But whether you are a faithful, daily reader or someone who reads it periodically or stumbled across it by accident and may not read it again, you have taken a few precious moments of your time to think about gratitude and perhaps consider briefly the blessings in your life for which you are grateful.
It has been a funny side effect of writing this blog that after some posts a family member or friend will call. “Are you alright? I didn’t like the way you sounded in today’s blog.” It makes me smile and does my heart good at the same time. It’s been interesting making one’s struggles public, as I did through much of last year. But I’ve heard from some folks that watching me work through various dramas and traumas in my life, navigating them with a grateful heart, has helped them deal with some of the issues in their own lives. I can’t think of anything better than that.
I don’t know how long I’ll keep writing; there are times when I feel like I’ve said all I can say. I will be grateful every day of my life, especially now that I’ve really started paying attention to it. My capacity to write about it in new and interesting ways will quit long before the feeling will wane. In the meantime, I’ll keep posting. Each day brings new blessings and new opportunities to say thank you for them. So, thank you!
