Tonight is a good one to offer simple gratitude. I’ve noticed that there’s a “Five Day Gratitude Challenge” going around on Facebook lately that asks people to write down at least three things they are grateful for for five days. It made me smile. “Five days? Ha! How about 50 days, how about 500 days?” As I aim toward 1,000 days I realize that it really doesn’t matter how many days, does it? What matters is taking time to offer gratitude for the blessings in your life. It doesn’t need to be a public list or a blog posted out there for the world to see. It can be as simple as, “Thank you,” fervently whispered when something you were hoping for happens, or a crisis is narrowly averted, or you drive over a slight rise and catch the glimpse of a supermoon, large and orange and bright hanging in the sky.
Thank you, when your scans come back cancer free, when you watch your child break through some struggle they were facing, when you thought you’d lost your wallet but a kind stranger calls to let you know they found it. Grateful to be forgiven, for finding your lost dog huddled under a park bench to get out of the rain, grateful for the neighbor who shoveled your driveway so you could get your car out and go to work. Saying thank you really is a simple thing. I think it must be so for everyone, isn’t it?
I am grateful for many things I experienced today: from admiring and photographing a beautiful woodpecker as it fed at the base of a tree in my back yard, to music and poetry that so often gives a voice to feelings that I don’t have words for. I am grateful as always that I have abundance of the basic necessities of life as well as many, many things that are considered luxuries in most other parts of the world and some parts of this country. And for family who sustain me in body, mind, and heart. At the end of the day it’s not about how long the list of things one is grateful for, or the eloquence with which that gratitude is expressed. What really matters is the feeling of it; the recognition that we are each blessed in some way every day. The gift is in the awareness of it and from that the expression of it flows. And even for the awareness of gratitude, I am grateful. And so it is.
