In Gratitude vs Ingrateful

“Sometimes a perfect blessing will arrive in the disguise of a mischievous intruder,” so said my teabag this week. There are many things in life that may not necessarily feel like a blessing at the time, but they are as much of a blessing as the many others we regularly acknowledge.

Perhaps the key to happiness is in our ability to find gratitude for the stuff we are least grateful for. Here are the five areas where ingratitude tends to slip in most:

Pain – Smoke detectors are a blessing. We love them because they put us on notice when something is amiss in our home. We love early warning systems of any kind because they potentially save us agony in the long run.?Pain; physical, emotional, and psychological, is the warning system for our bodies. It puts us on notice to be careful, to take it easy, and to get examined by a medical professional. Even mental anguish often serves a purpose, prompting us to move in a certain direction or to fully process our emotions. As unpleasant as pain is in any form, it can often be a gift in disguise intended to guide and protect us from harm.

Failure – It is not difficult to find gratitude when we win. Yet, it does not come so naturally when we lose. President John F. Kennedy once said, “Victory has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.” The most difficult times in life can at times be the greatest gifts, although it is often in retrospect that we can appreciate the lessons. Failure can be a wonderful teacher. It can lead us to execute differently down the road. It can assist us in honing our intuition for the future. It is most often, a necessary step to carving out a blueprint for success. In fact, success is often not possible without failure, and thus both should be equally celebrated with gratitude. Failure is a blessing. At its minimum, failure gives every win context. And at its maximum, it is what makes success possible at all.

Assists – Even the most practiced of appreciators can sometimes find themselves complaining. Perhaps it is the number of vitamin supplements one must take each day to have a fraction of the energy of their youth. Perhaps it is the need to wear glasses for reading as time wears upon one's eyes, or that as one gets older, joints can better handle a walk on the treadmill than a walk on the hard pavement. As life evolves, so does our need for assists in life. That is, we need more help than we once did. Happiness is the ability to find gratitude for the assists in life rather than resentment that they are necessary.

Impermanence – Nothing lasts. We cannot authentically be grateful for the fact that each day starts new, without also being grateful for the fact that each day ends. The only thing that is permanent is impermanence. Appreciation is part and parcel of impermanence because if everything lasted forever there would be nothing unique, special, and extraordinary to cling to. What makes everything so special is that in a blink of an eye, it can evaporate and that eventually, it will. Gratitude for impermanence is thankfulness for life itself.

Gratitude – Maybe gratitude and happiness are one and the same. Gratitude is a state of being in attraction mode. Your entire vibrational energy can change with the flip of a switch. The switch is gratitude. If you are sad, angry, depressed, lonely, or in any state you wish not to be in, gratitude is the first step to changing it. Finding gratitude for everything around you whether it be the rain or the sun, the good or the bad, failure or the success, is the key to attracting more of what you want.

As the Thanksgiving holiday approaches find gratitude all around you. ?Not just the things that are easy to be grateful for but rather for everything that you experience. That is, feel gratitude for your existence in its entirety. Live in gratitude. Living in gratitude means living in absolute appreciation for everything, good and bad, and the impermanence of both, because all of it is necessary to put you directly on the path of where you are meant to go.

Who knew a teabag could be so right. For this, and many things, I am grateful.

Happy Thanksgiving.