Over the years the theme of gratitude crossed my path in many ways. I try to remind myself to count my blessings. Yet like so many of us, I also tend to get drawn into the every day drama of life, often forgetting in that process how much I have to be grateful for.
I could of course claim this to be the inevitable consequence of living in a world where many things have yet to change for the better. But when I point at the outside world only, I overlook my own ability to make a contribution in how I experience life. It’s quite simple really. When I only focus on the negativity surrounding me; my view of the world literally becomes a negative one. When I focus on things to be grateful for, it soothes my heart and relaxes the frown between my eyebrows.
To quote an old Buddhist saying:
We suffer not because we live in the world, we suffer because the world lives in us
Or as, American author and personal development counselor Wayne Dyer puts it:
Most people spend the last minutes before falling asleep thinking about the things that went wrong that day; or how they were wronged by others. By doing so they program their subconscious to marinate negative feelings all night long and wake up next morning with the effects of it.
The first weeks in January are quite notorious for people waking up in the morning feeling off. After the consuming Christmas holidays, life goes back to normal and back to the barricades. While sipping my morning tea last week in one of those early January moods, my eye fell on a social media post suggesting to take a big glass jar and fill it over the year with notes on things to be grateful for. Empty it by next new years eve and you have a year full of goodness to look back on.
I really liked that suggestion and adopted it with a little twist. Every year for Christmas my children give me a big personalized weekly calendar with little notes, thumbnail pictures and previews of highlights for the coming year to look forward to. In fact last year I had already started to record memorable events, adding small notes on the back pages of my weeks.
For this year, 2019, my resolution is to write down at least one thing I am grateful for with every passed day in my calendar and use it as my mantra before I go to sleep. I’ll be curious to see how this affects my view on on the world and in effect my contentment in life.
The card that goes with this line of thoughts might well be the Knight of Gifts; the knight who observes the world from within and decides accordingly what to think, rather than allowing the outside to determine the knights way of thinking. As such it is entirely up to the knight how life unravels itself…
Click the card to learn more and/or draw your own card on the right of this blog,
Wishing you a grateful day,
Ingrid
The abridged spoken version of this spoken blog, features as end note on ‘Dutchbuzz’, the radio hour for Internationals every Tuesday from 10 to 11 pm on ‘Den Haag FM’ and can be found in the Programme Archive of the Dutchbuzz podcasts, dated January 15 , 2019 or click the link below
