Today is Thanksgiving Day in Canada. All weekend I have listened to friends and family express their gratitude for life, love, nature, community, spirit, beauty. Many people spoke about how lucky we are to live in North America.
It’s easy to feel how healing and empowering it is to be grateful. And it’s also so easy to forget the gratitude, when we are faced with all the challenges that life brings us.
One of the best practices I have discovered for staying connected to a sense of gratitude is what I call ‘the buddy system.’ Find a friend, and ask them if they would like to exchange a daily gratitude email. (You can include the weekend or not)
Just sit down at your computer and send a few sentences to your friend about something you are grateful for today. It doesn’t have to be big. This is important to remember. One day my friend wrote and said she was grateful for the smell and feel of her clean sheets.
You can commit to doing it for a month, three months, six months, or a year. Some of my students kept going long after they had agreed to stop, because it added a whole dimension to their lives. You’ll probably be surprised at the difference it makes. I was.
