Meditation on Gratitude

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Today and everyday, the good life is about gratitude, right? You bet! In this episode, I consider this all-encompassing thing we call “gratitude” during that time of year when many of us–most of us–sit at overflowing tables, bow our heads and give thanks with our friends and loved ones. May you find within it something that will both lift you and challenge you.

Three Points, a Poem and a Host of Gratitude Quotes

The Three Points:

1. We have an infinite capacity to take things for granted.
2. Gratitude is the acknowledgement that we are not alone.
3. Gratitude affirms that there is goodness in the world.

i thank You God for most this amazing (a poem by e.e. cummings)

i thank You God for most this amazing

day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth

day of life and of love and wings;and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any—lifted from the no

of all nothing—human merely being

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

A Host of Gratitude Quotes to Underscore Our Thanksgiving Holiday:

The struggle ends when gratitude begins.  –Neal Donald Walsh

If the only prayer you ever say is thank you, it will be enough.  –Meister Eckhart

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls bloom.  –Marcel Proust

Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.  –William Arthur Ward

Nothing is more honorable than a grateful heart.  –Seneca

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.  –Thornton Wilder

There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other as though everything is a miracle.  –Albert Einstein

Look at everything as though you were seeing it for the first or the last time, then your time on earth will be filled with glory.  –Betty Smith

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: It must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.  –William Faulkner

If you liked this episode, then try these other meditations and musings:

Meditation on Power and Powerlessness

Meditation on Friendship