Greetings Friends!
I hope this finds you wise and well! Please allow me to take a moment to express my gratitude for subscribing, reading, and listening over the last year. Your support (and time) mean far more than you know! Below, you’ll find a conversation with my good friend Brandon Tumblin (An Episode from Paradoxically Speaking) on the practice of gratitude and a short meditation titled How to Take Nothing for Granted.
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How to Take Nothing for Granted
The wisdom (or practice) of being grateful appears across wisdom traditions. Although philosophical and spiritual traditions often speak of gratitude in slightly different ways than we do in modern culture.
Take this quote from the Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast,
You think this is just another day in your life. It’s not just another day; it’s the one day. It’s the one day that is given to you today. It’s a gift. It’s the only gift you have right now — and the only appropriate response is gratefulness.
Similarly, my interview with Kristi Nelson (author of Wakeup Grateful) uncovered the difference between gratitude and being grateful. Nelson explained gratefulness is gratitude for life. It reminds us that we are continually receiving in simply being alive. While gratitude — as we know it — needs something good to happen, gratefulness only requires us to be awake. We do not need to do anything to feel grateful or wait for anything more.
How might your life change if you started to take nothing for granted?
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The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had a similar approach to life he called Amor Fati (Love of Fate). Nietzsche explained,
My formula for greatness in a human being is Amor Fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it… but love it.
Nietzsche’s approach doesn’t attempt to erase the past but instead accepts what has occurred, the good and the bad, the mistaken and the wise, resulting in all-embracing gratitude.
Gratefulness enables us to notice the things we often overlook and take for granted. The traditional gratitude practice scans our days to look for a few things to feel gratitude. Gratefulness works from the inside out — taking nothing for granted.
The path to becoming wiser (or learning to live) has more to do with being grateful for life (despite the everyday challenges) than we might realize. But similar to becoming wiser — no one ever became grateful merely by chance.
The theologian Henri Nouwen observed, “I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline.” Being grateful is a habit — just like any other virtue, it must be cultivated again and again.
Each moment of our lives provides another opportunity to practice being grateful for simply being alive.
To quote the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.”
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Thank you for reading/listening; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
J.W.
P.S. If you enjoyed the conversation. Please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify.