If you’re only grateful when things are going the way you think they should, you have much to discover about gratitude.
And how wonderful is it to have your horizons open up and what you thought was the limit of something be revealed to just be the beginning?
Gratitude is powerful, there’s no doubt about it. As a practice, as an attitude, it changes so much about your life, and rapidly.
But often people are only grateful when life looks the way they want it to.
The trouble is we are not in as much control of life as we think we are. The fact is, life has a particular logic, a momentum. It rolls in ways we never would expect, nor could we plan for.
Ryan Holiday, the Stoic philosopher and writer, explains it like this:
Life is a cart and we are dogs tied to it. If the cart is going to roll, it’s going to roll. We have the choice to be dragged through the mud, or to trot alongside.
Gratitude is the going with, not against.
When you truly get present and unconditional with gratitude, you’re actually seeing the good of this moment in time, exactly as it is, regardless of the way you think it should be.
Your awareness sifts down into your being, away from all the doing. Gratitude becomes not so much about your plans and schemes, or about what you possess and want – but who you fundamentally are, here, now.
Your life becomes based in the unshakable foundation of gratitude for existence itself. For the simple fact of being alive and aware and awake to now, and whatever it contains.
Gratitude stops being about stuff and things that fill life and starts being about the container: Life itself.
If you want more, explore that!
Two types of gratitude – a world apart