Agnes Thomas

I find myself content and happy on days when I wake up with a sense of gratitude and lead the day with a feeling of contentment. Though I have practiced gratitude as a virtue and guiding principle since my younger days, the last few years showed how difficult it is to be in a state of gratitude, yet how profound it is for my wellbeing and joy. The reflection of gratitude is personal, yet it is also shared as a common value and goal as we live in a time and place where our homes and social spaces are often filled with news of broken world updates where cynicism tends to rule the day. One comment I often hear from friends and the community is that it is easy to talk about gratitude, but it is challenging to feel grateful when there is so much chaos and unpleasant things around us. So why is gratitude important, and how do we develop and practice an attitude of gratitude in our lives?

Many years ago, I lived in a community with a gentleman named John. John always had a beautiful smile and words of love for all around him. You will never see John without a song of praise; he was humming while working in the garden or making candles in the workshop. I do not remember John being angry or upset about the numerous things that caused distress for many others in the community. In life and death, John chose to be gentle and reminded everyone around him through his small, almost quiet voice that we have so much to be grateful for, and there was no need to hurry but to be in awe of what/who was around you until his death. I do not know the whole story of John. Still, from what I understood, he had a tough life as a child and young man growing up with invisible disabilities; in fact, until he came to live in the community, he lived behind closed doors with no social interactions, shut out from the ‘big world.’ Was he bitter, or did he show resentment? No, he chose to show grace and love for life, and his words and paintings showed his appreciation for people around him, nature, birds, and the community.  There are many things from my time with John that I carry with me to this day. I consider his greatest gift to me was to be graceful and appreciate life with all of its challenges and blessings. John taught life to be treated like a hymn with its high and low notes, but it is still a song meant to share the beauty of life and joy. John taught me the gift of love, gentleness, and gratitude in the face of adversity.

I draw from John’s life that the practice of gratitude begins when we start acknowledging and accepting life as it is present. A sense of appreciation for life allows for desires and dreams to be filled with hope and a shared sense of community with people. With gratitude, we become more generous; we have much more to give as we have seen it in John’s life.  interestingly enough, it also reveals another truth: life is not small and narrow but big and open, where there is room for errors, imperfections, highs, lows, beauty, and pain. In gratitude, we often feel the divine that moves and grows within and around us, carrying the face of love, hope, joy, humility, and beauty. In gratitude, there is no place for feeling sorry but an anticipation of what good can come out of a situation and a hope for things to work out for the better. Gratitude is also a wish for the other to be well, always seeking the best of the other.

There are small yet beautiful ways we can all practice gratitude in our day today. A few things I practice include having a gratitude journal, making time to thank and show appreciation for people in my life, and, most importantly, like John, trying to be in a place of gratitude by choosing hope and joy over trials and turbulence.