How I’m Learning To Be More Grateful

I’ve always been grateful for everything I have. Or at least I thought I was. It turns out, that I was only really grateful for the things that I had and that I really wanted: a great family life, amazing friends, incredible holidays, trips out, the newest clothes, wonderful books. I’ve also come to realise that these feelings of gratitude, of appreciation, were also fleeting. I would be so grateful on my birthday, for example, or so grateful when the plane landed in a new country. But after a while, I would lose this sense of gratitude and end up wanting the next thing to be grateful for.

Practising gratitude has become a really big trend on social media over the last few years, and all for the right reasons. I have never really been one to practice gratitude and I’ve even found myself feeling like I don’t need to. The truth is, I didn’t really know what to write down on my list. Obviously I could put clean water, food, and having a roof over my head. But even for those things, I didn’t feel the same type of gratitude that I felt with the other things. Of course, I’m grateful for these things but I thought that I should be grateful for the bigger things that I have, the things that are ‘more important’. I thought that being grateful for our basic needs being met was redundant in the sense that everyone should just have them anyway.

Recently, however, I’ve come to view gratitude in a different way. I started making a list of the things I am grateful for but with a catch: each item had to be extremely specific. I ended up with a long, varied list: making daisy chains in the summer, the smell of toast in the morning, when candy floss melts on your tongue, birds tweeting. It was by focusing on the really little things that I came to realise just how lucky I am to have food, clean water, and a roof over my head. Sometimes the opposite of being grateful is not necessarily taking things for granted, but having a careless acceptance and expectation that those things will always be there. The reality is that they won’t.

I’m now much more aware of the things that I have in my life and how I view them. I fill up a bottle of cold water and think about how lucky I am to be able to drink when I need to. I go on car rides in the late summer evenings and think about how grateful I am to have friends to go with and to be able to witness the beautiful sunset. When I don’t want to study, I think about how grateful I am to have access to an education.

I think that we are all so lucky and that we all have something to be grateful for, regardless of our circumstances. The mere fact that we are alive and breathing should be something to be grateful for. Or the fact that we have working bodies and hearts that beat. It sounds really cheesy and almost pointless at first to be grateful for these kinds of things, but we shouldn’t take anything for granted in life. We are here to experience it all and I dare say that we should even be grateful for the bad moments. I would like to hope that if everyone were just a little bit more grateful for the lives that they have, that the world would be a bit happier.

Today, I am grateful for the sun that has shone all day, the smell of my clean laundry next to me, and this blog that I created to be able to write whatever I want.

What things are you grateful for today? I would love to hear from you.