A Red Balloon
Gratitude is like a red balloon that’s been let go of and begun drifting ever upward into the stratosphere. Least that’s how it ought to be. To me, gratitude is akin to a beautiful bouquet of balloons, multi-coloured and sent with love, delivered to our doorway with a wide smile.
It’s like the smell of a beautiful incense spiralling its way heavenwards in appreciation of the goodness of life toward us, a thankfulness for those gifts of kindness and goodwill bestowed on or toward us.
Does that sound like too much caramel popcorn in one sitting? And now you’re feeling a little green in the gills? Perhaps. But as we all know, we don’t all eat caramel popcorn everyday now do we!
But here’s the thing. I feel like we’ve de-sensitized ourselves to things we could value more (like gratitude) by tuning in on a daily basis to listen to and watch world-wide destruction as shown to us on our televisions. Now I’m not advocating we become ignorant or uninformed about world events.
Rather I’m promoting a scenario of ‘in addition to’ we might like to reflect on such matters as thankfulness and or appreciation too. It was Marcel Proust that said, “Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” It’s true, really!
Think about it. What is gratitude but a thankfulness and or appreciation of someone or something. And how many of those moments might we have in a day? If we seriously thought about it, we’d have some. Betcha a bouquet of balloons.
We don’t appear to give watching destruction as portrayed on the 6pm News a second thought. We let the everydayness of that coverage stick to us (figuratively speaking) without realising the build-up that’s accumulating on us over a period of time. Therein is the de-sensitization. We become used to it.
Gratitude is a proactive response, it’s what I call a penneylane mindstyle. It might come easier to some more than to others (and that’s just practise) but it goes to disposition. It rubs a settled dispostion (otherwise referred to by me as a habit) up the wrong way, all the time, every time! In other words, we can be lazy about retraining ourselves to think in ways that are more healthful for us.
Modelling is important in those first steps, so here’s a start. Thank you to all those friends and people who come to this Blog site regularly, to read and consider what it is I might be thinking and or sharing about on any given day. I love that you come, I love even more that you try to incorporate some of the things I write about into your life.
You’re always welcome. I enjoy your comments and interactions but most of all I love that you take time out of your busy days to pull up a chair and sit awhile with me. So hooroo (australianism for goodbye) for now. Ka kite ano (Maori for see you later).
