But life is also filled with quieter joys, subtler moments
and glimpses we might miss unless we’re looking. Today I want to share the
story of how I learned to look, and to encourage you to help your children
look, too. Simply by looking for blessings, we are blessed. – I wish I had begun this practice when
my own children were young.
A memory from my last year of teaching: Sandwiched between
gray snow and a mud-colored sky, I sat in the car and watched colleagues trudge
by, heads bent against the March wind, shoulders hunched under the weight of
books and papers. Downing the last
of my coffee, I looked at the list on my lap:
March 27
·
upside
down cat, purring through meditation
·
lamb and
lentil soup
·
softening
silhouettes of tree branches
·
first
worms of spring
Only four. I needed one more, one more thing for which I’d
been grateful over the past 24 hours. As I read through the list again, I was
caught by the worms I’d seen on my morning walk, reminding me of Marilyn’s
exuberant pronouncement: “I can’t wait till it’s spring, when there’ll be bats
in the air and worms in the ground!” Marilyn was an Animal Science major,
finishing her degree back in 1969 while I was finishing mine in English. We
shared a love of books and animals and fishing, and the first worms of spring
always reawaken memories of those years. And suddenly I knew the last item:
·
the gift
of friendship
I tucked the list into my briefcase and prepared to face the
day.
I still have that small list, along with literally thousands of others from eleven years of keeping track. It’s quite a collection of memories.
I still have that small list, along with literally thousands of others from eleven years of keeping track. It’s quite a collection of memories.
During the eleven years I practiced intentional gratitude, I
was never sure if my ongoing morning ritual “armed” me for the day or “opened”
me to it, but I do know that it made a difference: I carried less resentment,
less anger, even less fear. As e. e. cummings wrote, I found that “the eyes of
my eyes were opened” once I began to scavenge the days for gratefulness, for
what was good.
I’ll be honest here: left to my own devices, I probably would
have given up the practice after a year or so and fallen back into grumpier
ways. What kept me going for those eleven years was sharing my daily gratitude
list with a colleague.
Every school day – literally every day; we never missed one
– the two of us managed to find one another in the momentary lull before
students arrived so we could share what was on our lists.
Our lists included everything from the color of dawn to matters
of social justice, from our families or our cats to a great student essay, food and books and
birds, kindness and the texture of a wool blanket – and if we could think of
nothing else, we gave ourselves permission to start our list with “a place to
live, work to do, food on the table….”
Over time, we discovered that by having
to look for “things for which to be grateful,” we became more attuned to
beauty, to goodness, to possibilities, to hope. Instead of waiting for the next
shoe to drop, we watched for the next blessing.
This, it seems to me, would be a lovely habit to instill in
a child, this business of being on the lookout for “things for which to be
grateful” – for blessings. At our Family Service on Sunday morning, we always ask
everyone what they might like to thank God for, and the children always have
answers: an uncle who got a job, their cat or dog, a chance to ride horses, Spiderman, their mom or dad,
ice cream. They already have the impulse to be grateful. What if we cultivated
it? What if we all shared gratitude lists at home, day by day, for eleven
years?
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