Every morning I make a list of 20 things that I’m grateful for. Even though I write it every day the variety on each list surprises me. Sometimes I’m merely grateful for toothpaste. Other times I’m profoundly grateful for family, friends, health and vitality.
Maybe you’ve noticed a curious thing about gratitude. Do you only want to be grateful for the good things? Maybe superstitiously believing that gratitude of the “dark” things will bring more of them? Today I noticed that I was also grateful for some of the “dark” things too. Things that I wanted to avoid at the time they happened, yet in the perfect balance of life these things did happen and they gave me a great opportunity to expand my awareness and sometimes alter my thinking and behavior.
My gratitude lists often contain things I once thought were “dark”, that now provide me with new perspectives: Gratitude for the opportunity, the experience and the change in my life-direction that came out of that experience. We can never know the final outcome of an event. We can only connect the dots in the rear–view-mirror and trust that grateful expectation will attract what we want into our lives. Even in those cases where it doesn’t look quite like we expected.
Today I invite you to notice just one “dark” thing that you can add to your gratitude list and be grateful for a new awareness. Now you may be wondering if being grateful for the lesson and new awareness invites similar future events? It’s likely that “dark “events will happen again and when they do we have a choice; to resist and be angry at what happens OR be grateful for the change that is coming. One of the greatest benefits of looking at the “dark” events of our life with gratitude is that it often helps release us from continuing to try to prevent such things from happening again. Being grateful for everything in life brings us more awareness and aliveness and what the world needs is people who have come alive.
In gratitude.
