It’s Thanksgiving again and many will fleetingly acknowledge a few (or many) things they are grateful for today. Maybe you’ll go around the dinner table asking friends and family to share a few words. That reminds me of the year we did that. The kids were little and we had gathered pinecones from Plymouth and I thought it’d make a meaningful ritual to pass a pinecone and mention something we were grateful for. It was a disaster. Everyone was caught off guard and a few adults even seemed offended. How dare I require something of them when the whole idea of Thanksgiving was to stuff yourself to bursting? The pinecones sit at the bottom of a box of fall decorations never to see the light of day again. I learned.
I’ve always been a cup half-empty person. My focus was on a compulsive need to fill up the cup so I could at last be happy. When I achieve the right job, the right income, the right family, the right set of possessions, and the right body – then I will have earned the right to be happy. That’s how I was raised after all. Then I will celebrate and be grateful for having it all. For decades I existed like this (maybe you do too?).
Eventually I did come to understand how toxic this attitude is.
Nowadays, I have a gratitude practice which is simple and has turned me into more of a cup half-full person. Every night I take a few minutes to focus on the myriad of good things in my life. By choosing to see the world this way, I banish thoughts of not being good enough and not having enough. I am good enough and I certainly have enough. That’s blasphemy in our consumer driven, material world. I am a revolutionary. Are you?
ellisnelson 