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Ordinary gratitude
Sudie Crouch

Even before Halloween was over, Christmas was right beside it.
Literally.

On the shelves in the grocery store, Halloween candy was stacked beside Claxton fruit cakes.

It was kind of premature, I thought, but that’s how many things are now.

We are being rushed through the motions of life without being able to enjoy each holiday as it occurs before we are thrust into the next one.

Not just the holidays, either. We are rushed through every day – hurry up and wait.
Hurry, hurry, hurry.
You must always be busy.

The minute you accomplish this One Big Thing, you should be ready to start your Next Bigger Thing.

It is exhausting.

I don’t even know if we enjoy what we achieve or take time to appreciate what it took to get there.

We are just so busy rushing full steam ahead after the next thing.
I try to write in a gratitude journal every morning.

‘Try’ being the operative word here.

Some mornings, I end up not having time or I don’t make the time.

It helps me when my attitude gets crummy, and boy, let me tell you, sometimes my attitude is pretty lousy.

There’s some mornings, I just write, ‘thank you’ several times to get my mind and heart in the spirit of being thankful – I can be in such a funk that is it hard to think about everything I have been blessed with.

It’s funny how even when you try to be present and focused on practicing daily gratitude, it easily slips out of your habit.

And it’s funny how random conversations can sometimes occur to bring us back into that spirit of gratitude again.

While speaking with another parent last week, she mentioned how she enjoyed being able to spend so much time with her kids. “I am grateful for every moment I get to spend with them; not every mom gets that, especially if their work makes them work late. I may not be a professional career woman, but I am happy, and they are happy.”

Another conversation reminded me of the slower paced life we have here, which is something to be grateful for.

“I couldn’t imagine living in downtown Atlanta,” the lady commented. “I am grateful for our slower, dirt-road life.”

Right there within 24 hours I had two moments put in front of me to be reflect on things that I am thankful for – being able to spend so much time with my son and having a very quiet, peaceful life.

 

Don’t get me wrong; I never, not ever, take these for granted. But there may be moments I don’t focus on being as grateful as I should.

As we enter the month of November, we may start thinking more in terms of the bigger, grander things – those big miracles that are status makers on social media.

The moments that we think are life changing…sure, these are worthy of our gratitude.

But sometimes, it’s those ordinary, everyday things that can yield the longer-term effects of gratitude.

So, what if, just for today we were just thankful for the little, the tiny things that we take for granted, the things that we think are just kind of ordinary and maybe because of their simplicity, we think they aren’t worthy of our gratitude?

What if we were just thankful for those things?

And what if, that was all we ever needed to do?