Thanksgiving is every day
Photo by Sir Mervs via Flickr
Have your Facebook friends been updating with “thanks” messages this month? I noticed the trend a few weeks ago, and about 20 of my friends were doing it. They even encouraged the rest of us:
Let’s see how many people can do this. Every day this month until Thanksgiving, post one thing you are Thankful for. The longer you stick with it, the harder it gets! If you choose to accept this challenge, repost this message as your Status to invite others to play along. Now, post what you are THANKFUL for! Keep the gratitude rolling all month.
As of today, there is only one person still doing this. Either they have run out of things to be grateful for (doubtful), or learning to recognize and express it is harder than they thought. I vote the latter.
Anyone who has tried to keep a gratitude journal will recognize this (my friend Debb now keeps hers online). As much as I hate to say this, it is sometimes easier to be negative or stick your head in the sand.
Part of this is because the truly good things that happen in our lives are often the result of planning and hard work, and if things are not quite where we want them to be we have no one to blame but ourselves.
The other part of this is that we are truly a rich nation, and hardship comes from not attaining the things we *want*, not the things we *need*. (When was the last time you had to worry about clean drinking water?)
My challenge to you is think of Thanksgiving as an everyday event (I feel the same way about Valentine’s Day.) When you become comfortable with gratitude, you will find that negative thoughts, people, and situations just don’t fit in your life anymore.
Happy Thanksgiving to all our US readers, and I hope you enjoy 365 more Thanksgivings this year.
I am thankful for you and your wonderful blog! You and Warren are such great friends and even more, such great inspirations for getting what you truly want out of life!
And yes, that Debb Whitlock is amazing – what a standard she has set for bloggers!
Nice post! It’s good to remember to be thankful for things everyday. I know I am quite thankful for bottled water.
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!
And how are you dealing with parting with items that are near and dear? I know you mentioned having a hard time with some of it. What have you decided or what helps you to decide exactly what you will keep and store during your travels?
Hi, Money Funk. I’m having some real trouble parting with some things, and the true test will come on my birthday in a few weeks. I’m having a sort of reverse birthday party where my friends fight over 39 of my favorite things (in honor of my 39th birthday). So I’m now down to parting with the things I love the most and not just the boring stuff like boxes of things we weren’t using anyway. I’ll definitely write about it on the blog, so stay tuned.
Karen, you are such a good friend, and I really appreciate your comment here. Like I’ve said before, without the wonderful supportive friends in our lives, I don’t think we would have ever felt confident enough to take this big leap. So the next time you give me a hard time about leaving, know that you only have yourself to blame.
Excellent thoughts on Thanksgiving and gratitude. I know when I started my 100 Days of Gratitude exercise here 64 days ago I truly wondered if there comes a moment where I really would make the transition from saying I am grateful to ‘being’ grateful.
I have always been a positive person – raised by not just glass 1/2 full parents – but glass completely full parents; however I had never been intentional and thoughtful about what/who in my life I am truly grateful for – I could always rattle off a few when pressed in a conversation (health, family.)
I will tell you the end of my day will never be the same since I started this adventure – as I have said before there are some days I just want to say I am grateful for…cheese as an example – and yet by stretching myself to think about the experiences and people of that day I am absolutely showered in riches every night.
I have never slept better since beginning the 100 Days of Gratitude – doing it on-line keeps me on top of the acountability. (Though over this turkey holiday I had a technical difficulty and couldn’t post for 4 days – so while I wrote it in the hard cover journal – it still didn’t feel the same – thankfully we got those missing posts up today.)
Pausing to clearly identify the people, places and experiences shaping my days has helped me identify patterns of greatness I am willing to more fully explore.
And when you take off on your adventure Betsy….Karen, you can blame me and the Mayor and a night at El Camino!
Debb, what a great result – you are sleeping better every night for having done your gratitude journal. Do-it-yourself Ambien!
Thank you for sharing the practical results of this exercise. Too often people go for the “feel good” part of it without listing the ROI. Most people aren’t willing to start something if they aren’t going to get something out of it.
And I guess this is as good a time as any to “out” you to our readers as the one-half of the couple we were with the night we decided to go on this crazy adventure.
Wow, a reverse birthday party. What an interesting and brillant concept! Why don’t you consider keeping and storing those items dear to you?. You will be back from travels one day.
What is your emotional pull for the concrete decision to rid of them?
I am storing some things for my return – mom’s recipes, some jewelry, art work, etc. But the favorites I have now are things that I won’t need at all for the next 3 years, and the cost of storing them while we are gone is not really justified. Plus, I’m sure we’ll find other things on the road to send back.
My emotions are running high on the subject, but I’m grateful knowing that these things that mean so much to me will be enjoyed and cared for by the people I love. And that is much more comforting than putting them in storage for 3 years.
I think this is all part of the process of letting go of the life I’m living now to have room for new things on this adventure (both literally and figuratively).