Fall is officially here, finally, even in Southern California. The air is cooler, we’ve had one bad fire already, daylight savings time is over, and now it’s even rained! It must be fall, which means that Thanksgiving and the Christmas season is on its way. Later in the month, more people will be talking about being thankful and grateful, so why not get a headstart?
I think that learning to cultivate an attitude of gratitude is the single most important way to help us be happy in life, no matter what our circumstances regarding family, age, health, wealth or anything else. If you think about it, it’s ridiculously simple. Of course, if we focus on what is good in our lives, we will have a better outlook than if we focus on the negative. But it goes a lot deeper than that.
Our brains get good at those things we practice. If we are soldiers, they get good at scanning the environment for enemy activity. If we are rock climbers, they get good at seeing toeholds and footholds in a rockface that most perceive as unclimbable. If we approach life in a critical negative way, we will get better and better at seeing the bad things around us. They will jump out, and validate our perception of “look how bad things are”.
In that same environment, however, are good things as well. If we practice and really train ourselves to look for the good in each day, each person, each moment, we will get better and better at that as well. We cannot control many aspects of our environments, but we can teach ourselves to read them differently. The simple act of noticing and acknowledging the positive in every situation has the potential to radically change our entire perception of how are lives are going.
In my years of practice, I have worked with people who find themselves in a wide variety of situations. What I have found is that it isn’t the external situation that predicts how the person reacts and how happy or unhappy they area. Instead, it is that person’s (usually lifelong) attitude and ability to be grateful that is the best predictor. People can have relatively minor problems, and be very unhappy. They can also have incredibly serious problems, and still have a basic sense of joy and peace about them. They manage this by being grateful for the small gifts of each day.
So my thought for you as we begin this fall is to teach yourself, starting right now, to look for the small gifts in every day, and in your own way, whatever fits your beliefs, give thanks for them. We don’t have to ignore the negative, and we certainly want to fix and change whatever we can. And, in the middle of all that, we can look for smile on someone’s face, the ray of sunshine through the clouds, the opportunity to help someone in some small way — all of the blessings that are there around us no matter what.
To close, here is a quote from Victor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, which he wrote about his own experiences in a WWII concentration camp.
Our attitude towards what has happened to us in life is the important thing to recognize. Once hopeless, my life is now hope-full, but it did not happen overnight. The last of human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, is to choose one’s own way.
-Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Related posts: