Gratitude

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YOUR ATTITUDE OF GRATITUDE
Nobel laureate, Hans Seyle, spent his life studying the effects of
stress on human physiology. He reported that the attitude of
"vengeance" had the most stressful impact on the human body. He also
declared that "gratitude" was the least stressful emotion anyone could
experience. If you strengthened your level of gratitude, you'd lower
your stress level...something each of us could well afford to do.

Sachiko Mirata, a scholar of Islam, calls gratitude the first
character trait that people owe Allah. He writes, "Ingratitude is to
shut our eyes to the obvious." When we open our eyes to all that is
around us, and we contemplate all with a grateful heart, then even the
common articles made for daily use become endowed with beauty. To
paraphrase George Washington Carver, "when you love [appreciate] it
enough, anything will talk with you."

How can your daily actions display your growing gratitude? Here are
some helpful hints.

---Express your thankfulness by doing the necessary, but menial tasks
around your home, so that other family members don't have to do them.
Become like the Franciscan, Brother Lawrence when he prayed, "Lord,
make me a saint through my washing the pots and pans."

---Make the words, "Thank you for..." a habitual part of your working
vocabulary. Kahlil Gibran once wrote, "I have learned silence from
the talkative, tolerance from the intolerant and kindness from the
unkind. I should not be ungrateful to those teachers." The medieval
Christian mystic Meister Eckhart suggests that if the only prayer we
say in our lifetime is "thank you," that would suffice

---Learn to appreciate who you are. Another Nobel Prize winner,
Albert Schweitzer cautions that "Your soul suffers if you live
superficially and ungratefully."

---Regard all things, all events, all living beings with
gratefulness. Take, for example a pencil, a dish, anything, and hold
it before you in both hands. Regard it for a while. Forgetting its
use and name, continue to regard it with appreciation. Ask yourself
seriously, "What is it really?" Joseph Campbell writes that when you
do this, "Its dimension of wonder opens; for the mystery of the being
of that being is identical with the mystery of the being of the
universe---and yourself."

---Gratitude paid to all around us becomes a spiritual exercise.
Daily, show your gratitude to the music that enchants you, to your
shoes that protect your feet form the wear and tear of the elements of
the earth, to the movie that brings tears to your eyes and joy to your
heart, to the warmth of the sun upon which all life depends.

Finally, strengthen your gratitude for the relationships you have
with everyone around you. Appreciate how people have touched your
life, however briefly. The value of personal relationships to other
living beings creates intimacy. Intimacy creates understanding.
Understanding creates love. And love after all, is that for which we
need to be most grateful. Take your life for grateful, not for granted, and you may indeed find joy in your being alive.

"A good time is a taste of Gratefulness.."

By Lloyd J. Thomas, Ph.D.