Gratitude should be a verb, not a noun.
In primary school, we were taught that nouns were ‘people, places, and things’, and verbs were ‘doing’ and ‘action’ words. Sure, the act of ‘expressing’ gratitude is a verb, but gratitude is a constantly evolving and growing and fluctuating process, a unrelenting and desirable internal dialogue with oneself, a feeling of appreciation…. a ‘doing’ word.
An associate on facebook posted the following note the other day;
How can we be happy in the moment we’re in if the world we live is conditioned to make us want more.…and my answer was so simple I even questioned it myself. Be grateful. And for the following days I thought about what it TRULY meant to be grateful, and what benefits one could see by living in a state of gratitude. It just seemed too simple to my over analytical state of mind!
How can we feel content in life when we are programmed to need more than is realistically necessary in order to feel bliss.
How do we strip our needs back to basics when people who expect the very thing we despise surround us.
Am I born in the wrong time if all I want is to live in a tree yet need to commercialize to climb it.
Is there a happy medium between having nothing and having too much.
How do we move forward when the destination consumes us so much we no longer like the journey.
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. Melody BeattieLast week I had to fly to Sydney to work on a new interior design project for the firm. It involved 10 hour days of data collection on workstyles, on my feet carrying a laptop. At the end of each day I was completely exhausted… too exhausted to sit in my hotel room and work on my two uni assignments, due on the day I returned to Melbourne. Over the weekend, I did fly back, late on Friday night and modeled in two days of shoots from 7am until 5pm both Saturday and Sunday before flying back to Sydney on Sunday night.
It really was disastrous. I got sick, and I couldn’t shake the headaches. I lived on caffeine, and I slept poorly. My school work didn’t get done, and everything that could go wrong with technology, taxi’s, getting lost, etc… did. I couldn’t postpone the photoshoot as I had committed to a team (and to be honest I needed the money and the addition to my folio) and I couldn’t turn the Sydney project down as it my first foray into this kind of project work. And knowing that I was missing classes and submission deadlines was doing my perfectionist head in.
But over the days, as I thought about gratitude, and what drove me to do all these things (simultaneously) I realized I was in amazing position. I had a free trip to Sydney all expenses paid, I got to visit my girlfriend in her new city and explore it myself. I got to be a part of an amazing project and push my career professionally. I had secured a lucrative modeling campaign that enabled me to contribute the first of funds to my house deposit, not to mention expand my network, and I was developing an awareness of what my personal priorities were and should be. It was only the flick of a switch, and when people asked how it was going, I started to say ‘interesting!’ instead of ‘exhausting’.
Gratitude turns our problems into lessons and gifts, failures into successes of experience and knowledge, it makes the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into significant events. Gratitude is a mindset easily flipped into a positive state. You can be grateful for the bad things that happen to you as well as the good. You may be cursing that hangover, but alternatively be grateful for the courage those few glasses of wine gave you to chat up that cute person and get their number. I know I was!! ;)
The act of being grateful rests on choice. YOU choose whether a scenario is a catastrophe, or a beautiful lesson.
A few months ago I started keeping a gratitude journal following a very dark period of existence. I aimed for three things every day that I was grateful for, even if it was as simple as ‘remembering an umbrella on the day that it rained’ or as obvious as ‘getting promoted’. A lot of the time I couldn’t think of three things… its harder than you think. On those days I wrote down what a stranger may be grateful for…. No queues at the supermarket, a warm bed to sleep in for once, a newborn child. These things reminded me that gratitude was specific yet different for every person, and those who had a lot less (in my eyes) actually had more than enough. Even if I couldn’t find my own positive light at the end of the day, I could at least see someone elses.
Its not a new concept, its not even ‘new-age’. Its just pure fact… if you are truly grateful for the activity, state or object, then what you have (or have experienced) is valuable to YOU, and enough. It is simple economics – supply will never meet demand, and the same goes for the human psyche. The more we learn, the more we realise how much we dont know, so there is always that desire reach beyond. The sad thing is most of us will never touch the wall with our outstretched fingers, because we continue to move it further away. The more money we make, the more things we want to buy, the more we see the world, the more we want to travel, the more opportunities that present themselves, the more we take on and the less time we have, and the more successful we are, the more awareness we develop around how more successful we could become. It is a cycle of events that is unrelenting and expands ripple apon ripple, unless we find one thing; gratitude.
