The Meaning Of Gratitude

The Meaning Of Gratitude

 I don't know many people who would argue against the value of giving thanks, so on the surface, it would seem like I'm just preaching to the choir here. It's easy to be grateful for all the blessings we have in life, such as family, friends, health, food, shelter, etc. Expressing gratitude is also associated with several benefits from better mental and physical health to better relationships and productivity. I recently typed gratitude into a Google search and it returned 109,000,000 results, and I noticed a disturbing trend. Based on the best links that came back, it seems that many people use gratitude for selfish ends. Among the top links returned on the first page of my search were: "31 Benefits of Gratitude You Didn't Know About," "Can Gratitude Help Millennials Succeed?" and "7 Surprising Health Benefits of Gratitude." In my experience, the only true practice of gratitude is when it is done to enrich others. In fact, in my regular gratitude practice, I specifically ask the recipient not to acknowledge this, but rather, if they feel compelled to respond, to send a similar message of it to anyone in their life other than me. I believe that expressing gratitude for selfish reasons will eventually backfire in the same way that I see general selfishness and greed eventually backfire on people. It's not always easy, but in the long run, helping others is much more fulfilling than taking care of yourself. Our society is, in according to my opinion, captivated by the results, by its damage. I have found that the need for results makes those results less likely to occur. Therefore, my focus is primarily based on process and purpose. Unfortunately, I don't have time to go into the process and purpose (but I will in a future blog post) because I want to tackle another issue with how people practice giving thanks. Another problem I have with the way people express gratitude is that they often focus on the easy things. If you've read my blogs before, you've probably seen me utter the line, "Life is 10% what happens and 90% how you react to it" (although now I believe it's more like 3% and 97 %). I found that once I learned to accept the bad things that happened to me and be grateful for them, it accelerated my growth exponentially. As a child, I cursed that life was not fair and often felt sorry for myself. I think a big reason I felt that way was because my mother died two days before my fourth birthday. Regardless of the cause, my only regret was that I made a bad situation worse. In the end, I realized that there is a positive side to losing my mom at a young age. It made me a more sensitive person, and these qualities serve me to this day. I'm even thankful for all the people who bullied or abused me when I was down because otherwise, I wouldn't have gained the valuable skills or knowledge I have. These experiences forced me to learn to problem solve at a young age and think on my feet. All of these qualities and skills are vital to the work I do today. In addition, I also suffered from deep depression and anxiety after my mom died, but fighting those battles made me a better person. Even though it took a lot longer than I would have liked, I like the person I am today. If I said it all, if I could choose, I would give up all these advantages in a second to have my mother back even for a few days. But I can't choose, so I've finally learned to play the cards I've been dealt with with an eye toward the future. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking about what would have been or could have been. In my case, it would be if my mother was alive. But these fantasies are full of inaccuracies because they imagine an idealized version of the person I am now, and the reality is that I may have ended up being a completely different person. Maybe even an entitled spoiled mama's boy with very little compassion for all I know. If you want to accelerate your growth, learn to be grateful for the things you missed or went wrong, as well as the things that went right, and when you choose to express it outwardly, do it to enrich others to get some benefits for yourself.