Practicing Gratitude

Good lord, I have an endless list of things I am grateful for.

Today I will mention the obvious: my mother. I have this incredible mother who is smart and passionate. She instilled in me virtues and ideals that I use to interpret and navigate the world everyday. She exposed me to music and films and art and books and politics and taught me that these things are important. She taught me how to use profanity with conviction and flair. I can talk to her about anything whether it is sex or a documentary I saw last week or current events in Africa. In fact, I can't imagine who I might be if I hadn't been raised by my mother. I shudder to think of it. Plus, even when I fuck up my mother shows me nothing but praise and support. She is my biggest fan. She has supported me through this education adventure with love, encouragement and money when I need it and is always telling me not to worry (which I do anyway) because she is only a phone call away when I need her. I guess it's that she believes in me that is so special (even when I don't) and it's an incredible feeling to have someone like that in your life. Especially when it is someone you respect. I am truly, eternally grateful for my mother.

 

I like to give Snowy my gratitude for giving me advice; I think it was about a year and 1/2 ago on relationships. I just joined TFP and was ready to give it all up, 30 years down the drain.
So I took your advice and we have been working on things ever since. It's a slow go, but aleast we are trying.

 

I have endless list of people... But there are a few who went out of their way to make me better...
I would like to give gratitude to my two friends (one during 10th grade and the other during pre-college) who taught me Maths. If not for them I could not have made it. I also would like to give gratitude to an online friend who coached me and helped me turn around our sex life few years ago.

 

I'm thankful for my wife and my little dog. For my friends and my parents. For a tradition that I love, with texts I love to study. And for all my students, even the ones that I wish were more engaged. Every time I get to teach it gives me a happy inside.

 

I am greatful that I, myself, was born into the universe.

How strange it is energy and matter can come together in such harmony to question its own existence and experience all the dimensions around it. I grateful for being able to experience the universe, as me, and see it and appreciate it the way that I do.

I'm grateful, so very grateful, for the awesome souls that I've had the great privileged to journey and share this experience with.

 

I am eternally grateful for my children. They give me purpose, inspire me, and are the source of my greatest joy and pride.

 

Love this one, I feel the same about mine. They have all move out and are own their own.

 

I am grateful that I have had the opportunities, 100 times over, to reflect on being grateful.

 

I am grateful for what can only be described as dumb luck. The old cosmic roulette wheel has been real kind to me. I managed to stagger into real life at around 20 years of age and it has been nothing but good times for the most part. Can't believe that my effort alone is responsible for putting where I am today. Because I'm not that smart. Or that ambitious. Yet somehow I ended up with this awesome life. At no point have I needed anything and not been able to get it; at no time have I been denied a reasonable want. So, as far as I see it, either I'm incredibly boring or incredibly lucky.

Man, don't really know what to make of it all.

Especially since I don't believe in luck.

 

Grateful for my father... whether i like it or not, i am a slightly refined, yet also more extreme verison of him... and i like that...

 

Gratitude is one of my foundation feelings/positions. When I was in my twenties and thirties, people around me thought it was a sign of weakness in me, of subservience. As if there was fault in being grateful for what was 'mine by right'. I contested the notion of 'right', and noticed that they were the first to feel 'hard done by' when stuff got taken away. I tentatively concluded that the greater our capacity for gratitude, the less we experience disappointment. I always give people the thanks and appreciation they deserve, and I mean it from the depths of my soul.

cynthetiq 's 'upright and vertical' is awesome. Everything else is adornment. To be Here At All ... I relate to Mick 's post and dearly wish I could one-to-one experience that cosmic/spiritual connection, because much of my life has been lived with a quiet sense of WTF and a quieter response of "I don't bloody know". Plan9 mentions 'dumb luck'; 'Pig ignorance' describes many of my own wanderings since birth.

There is one person who has turned more of my life around than I suspected I even had. A true Southern gentlewoman, my Texas Honey, a great photographer/thinker/tech-geek who added heart to my backbone, and backbone to my heart, limited, due to our health, to emails and skype. Since her recent bad stroke, she has hardly been able to communicate for nearly a year and a half. Her qualities: impeccable courtesy, high principles, and behaved according to them wherever she was and regardless of advantage or disadvantage to herself. In short, classy. Qualities I have always aspired to - the English concept of class never satisfied me.

I've been sitting at the computer for about two hours, writing nothing, but thinking through how she helped me refine the velvet in my glove and temper the iron in my hand, both in my dealings with people and myself, and in my approach to my art. Many, many memories. Dang it. This sad opportunity to take inventory feels like an absent living wake. I give thanks.

 

An over inflated sense of entitlement seems to be a common and ugly affliction this day and age. People think they deserve to be rude and disrespectful to others by right, and it's a quality in people I have little tolerance for. I've been doing some form of customer and client services since I could work, and lord knows I've copped my share of bad attitudes and disrespect. I refuse to dish it out to anyone else just trying to do their job. Most of us, when we really think about it, lead amazingly comfortable and privileged lives. I try to keep that in mind at all times. Because unless some shit is life threatening, I just don't see the need for the anxiety and anger.

One thing I've noticed over the years, if you want to take a real peak into someones soul, see how they handle themselves with exceptionally bad service at a restaurant. You'll learn all sorts of truths about a person there.

Today I am grateful that with putting minimal effort into getting anywhere in my life I get by with a very comfortable lifestyle. So comfortable I was able to buy a motorbike that will finally arrive on Friday. And riding that thing makes me appreciate life on all kinds of levels and facets.