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Today's
quotation:
Gratitude is the
highest form of acceptance. Like patience, it is one of
the catalytic agents, one of the alchemist's secrets for turning dross
to
gold, hell to heaven, death to life. Where there is gratitude we
get the
teaching. Where there is resistance we discover only that it keeps
us
painfully ignorant.
Stephen Levine
A
Year to Live
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Today's
Meditation:
I like the
idea of putting the concepts of gratitude and acceptance together.
After all, I can't feel grateful for your friendship until
I accept the fact that you are a friend of mine. I
can't be grateful for the gift unless I accept the
gift. I can't be grateful for having a roof over my
head and food to eat until I've accepted the presence of
both-- my resistance would be fearing the loss of both, and
not feeling grateful because I'm not sure that I won't
lose my home and my food.
Gratitude
unlocks many, many doors in our lives. It's one of
the strongest tools we have in our toolbox that's designed
to help us to create a life that we can live fully, though
we run the constant risk of starting to take things for
granted and not feeling the gratitude that should be so
important to us. When we feel and show gratitude,
we're acknowledging the fact that much of what we have in
life comes from outside of ourselves, and that we often
haven't done anything to actually deserve what we have.
Of
course, it's a brutal trap to think that we have to
deserve everything that comes our way-- some good things
just happen. So we don't want to fall into that
trap-- we can look at something undeserved as something
wonderful for which we can be very thankful. And
that gratitude is the key to not taking it for granted, to
recognizing the fact that life is very generous to us
often without rhyme or reason, and we can accept the good
and not resist it, thus enriching our lives.
Below,
John makes a great point when he ties gratitude to life,
hope, faith and virtually every other virtue that human
beings can exhibit. If we want to be virtuous
people, it seems, we must be grateful people. After
all, what good do the virtues do us if we aren't thankful
for them?
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