Choose between gratitude and taking for granted
A heart filled with gratitude is one that promotes joyous living. And the positive gifts that thankfulness confers upon us are many. It fills your life with peace, joy and serenity. It banishes negative thinking – for gratitude and complaints, gratitude and worry, grati- tude and anxiety just cannot exist together.
Why should I be grateful? Most of the world’s scrip- tures and nearly all the world’s great spiritual mas- ters emphasise that grati- tude is essential for the life beautiful. Most ordi- nary people too, would agree that complaining and criticising can make life bitter and sour – and bitterness and sourness, as we know, are not anybody’s ‘flavours-of-the-week!’ Being grateful makes us positive, happy and optimistic; it helps us see the bright side of life. It teaches us the art of appreciation, which, I am afraid, is becoming a lost art for some of us today.
Some experts believe that we lack in the spirit of gratitude because we take things for granted. The street urchin into whose hands you drop a packet of biscuits looks up at you with gratitude and smiles happily. He has known what it is to be hungry, to go without food oftentimes. He knows the value of those biscuits which may not be dainty enough for our palates. What do we do? Someone takes the trouble to shop and plan and cook and clean, so that a plate of hot food is put before us at regular intervals; we make faces and complain that the dish is either too spicy or not spicy enough; that it is boring; that it is not our favourite recipe that has been served; and that the vegetables on the plate are not the ones we like.
May be we need to go without the things we take for granted, to be able to appreciate what we have. Now give me one good reason why we should allow that to happen? Why should we al- low ourselves to go through a loss just to realise the value of what we already have?
The Roman philosopher Cicero said: “Grati- tude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.”
A heart filled with gratitude is one that promotes joyous living. And the positive gifts that thankfulness confers upon us are many. It fills your life with peace, joy and serenity. It banishes negative thinking – for gratitude and complaints, gratitude and worry, gratitude and anxiety just cannot exist together!
Thankfulness makes you young in spirit – for it enables you to behold the miraculous hand of God in everything you see around you. Children are blessed with this great gift – and their enthu- siasm and exuberance are quite infectious. How- ever, as we grow older, we lose this sense of joy and begin to take things for granted. We become jaded and cynical. Let us thank God again and again, if we wish to keep the child in us alive!
Thankfulness makes us nice people to be with – we will find people drawn to us; we will see that we make more and more friends. Peo- ple who are prone to complaints and self-pity are seldom liked. They are shunned by their friends and colleagues, for they only pass on their crankiness and dullness to others. On the other hand, cheerful, spirited people exude con- fidence and optimism. The mood around them is upbeat and positive. They not only make new friends easily – they retain all their old friends too, which is no easy feat in this age of passing relationships and nodding acquaintances.
Thankfulness is the perfect antidote to neg- ative emotions like depression, frustration, re- sentment and bitterness. When we fail to ap- preciate our gifts and our friends, our spiritual evolution is thwarted and our minds are dark- ened. Gratitude is the light that can illumine us inside and brighten the environment we live in.
Gratitude also helps us grow in the spirit of tolerance and acceptance. The world we live in is far from perfect; we are not ourselves paragons of perfection; and the same goes for the people around us. As they say, it’s a crazy, mixed-up world, but we must recognise our- selves as part of all this imperfection and accept life as it comes. Thankfulness leads us on to gen- erous giving and sharing. The more grateful you are, the more you are inclined to share what you have with others. In this, as in so much else, the more we give, the more we get – whether it is gifts, wealth, love or friendship.