A Daily Dose of Gratitude

I was reading in the paper awhile ago about the guy who had won $17 million in the lottery. And if that wasn’t enough, in the last 5 years he’d also won two other lotteries valued at around $1 million each, as well as a couple more in the five-digits.

What was your automatic reaction when you read this – what immediately came up for you? Was it jealousy? Awe? Joy? Anger? Did your thoughts jump to how fortunate you are? Or to how things would be so much easier if only you had that kind of luck? What did you think about him personally: Did you dislike him? Did you see him as a worthy being, deserving of good fortune?

Any or all of these thoughts and feelings are, of course, completely natural: there is no inherent right or wrong in your reactions. But did your gut response become a negative feeling that stuck around for awhile, or was it just a fleeting sensation? Or maybe it had no real impact at all.

Our automatic thoughts and feelings about things like this might say something about our approach to life in general. So if we know someone whose responses to others’ good fortunes tend to lean toward the negative or self-defeating, it might help them to understand that there is an antidote to this. It lies in developing a stronger perspective of gratitude.

It seems to be a truth that in many circumstances what we focus on expands: we know that negativity breeds negativity, and we’ve all experienced a sense of strength when we’ve chosen to see positivity, hope, and possibility. So if we make a habit of developing a perspective of gratitude, we come to notice and acknowledge more quickly the fact that we truly win the lottery every day of our lives in many regards. And when we can do this, there’s no room left for envy or self-pity.

But this practice of gratitude isn’t just about comparing our fortunes – it’s also a helpful little tool to use when we feel stressed, over-worked, disrespected… the list can go on and on. It’s for whenever we find ourselves getting caught up in our own micro-level problems, and imagining our difficulties as being more significant than they really are. It’s for when we need to step out of our heads for a moment and reassess what’s really important in the here and now.

Ask someone you care about (or try it yourself, if you don’t already) to experiment with cultivating this perspective of gratitude. It’s truly as simple as making a point many times a day to just stop and take a look around, think about the love we have in our lives and the freedoms we enjoy, and just say “Thank you”. The gratitude doesn’t need to be directed toward anyone in particular: the sheer act of acknowledgment and expression is enough.