I’ve always thought that I knew a lot about gratitude. Gratitude is one of my top five signature strengths. I routinely send thank you notes for presents, and I feel grateful for what I have and for what I have accomplished in my life.
What else is there to know?
But a few nights ago I listened to a teleconference about gratitude, given by Deb Levy, an educator and a teaching assistant to Tal Ben-Shahar at Harvard. Deb’s talk started me thinking how gratitude could play an even larger role in my life.
Since the teleconference I have read more on the emerging research on gratitude and am amazed at the role gratitude can play in changing people’s lives.
What I have read tells me that gratitude is a choice. And it’s not always easy to choose gratitude. It demands that we acknowledge the gifts from others. That we view life through a lens of gratitude.
It’s easy to be grateful for the food we eat and the sun that shines, but to view life through gratitude means that being grateful replaces the feeling that we deserve all that life can give us. It replaces the feeling that we have suffered for everything that we’ve achieved. Or that we’re still a victim of some kind.
What choosing gratitude means is that we see ourselves as incomplete and in need of the help others have given us.
So even though the number of people around my dining room table will be smaller than the number of guests my grandmother would have had at her Thanksgiving table when I was a child, I can choose a to be part of a very large community.
This Thanksgiving Day I will thank my husband and my children for all they have given me. I am gladly and gratefully dependent upon them.
And I will thank the members of that community that I see in my mind’s eye for all of the gifts I have received—that community includes people from long ago in my life as well as people that I saw Friday at the office.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Nancy
www.nwcoaching.com
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