Gratitude

It is quiet surprising to know that many people find it difficult to show appreciation when they receive favour(s) from others. What prevents people from saying “Thank You” or “I Appreciate Your Kind Gesture”? Or because they do know the importance of showing appreciation or it is due to reluctance.  Gratitude from the Macmillan dictionary means a feeling of being grateful to someone because he/she have given you something or done something for you.

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turns a meal it a feast, house into  home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. Courtesies of a small and trivial character are the ones which strike deepest in grateful and appreciating heart. If you count all your assets, you always show a profit.

I have learnt silence from the talkative, tolerance from intolerant and kindness from the unkind, yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers. Feeling gratified and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and giving it. Grace is not a simple prayer you chant before taking a meal but rather it a way to live. Gratitude is the sign of noble soul. When eating bamboo sprouts, remember the man who planted them.

Gratitude goes beyond the “mine” and” thine” and claims the truth that all is a pure great gift. In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous responsive to the awareness of gifts received, but I now come to realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.

To educate my self for the feeling of gratitude means to take nothing for granted but always seek out and value the kind that will stand behind the action. Nothing that is done for you is a matter of course. Everything originates in a will for the good which directs to you.

Train yourself never to put off the word or action for the expression of gratitude. He who does not thank for the little will not thank for the much. You say “if I had a little more should be very satisfied”.  You make a mistake if you are not content with what you have. You would not be satisfied if it were doubled. To know the value of generosity, it is necessary to have suffered from cold indifference of others.

Only the stomach rarely feels hungry scorns common things.

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but live by them.   

 BY ARYEETEY ROWLAND JOHNSON