How Can I Be More Grateful?

I recently saw a Steve Pavlina’s video post, ‘creating abundance’, and it briefly mentioned gratefulness in it.  Why did he mention this?  He probably got inspiration from somewhere, the same way I received inspiration from his video.  At the time it was playing, I was having a chat with my business partner and good friend, Jason Fonceca, and we were having an interesting conversation.  I’m fantastically grateful all the time, about so many things, and after a deeply involved conversation about the many subtleties of gratefulness, I felt pulled to ask him a pretty funny question.

“How Can I be more Grateful?”

You’re being more grateful right now, even the act of writing this is a ‘more grateful’ thing.  ‘Cause, you can ask a million questions sure, but to type out the answer in order to help out readers of SpiritSentient? That’s putting some grateful energy into it. And you have, well, whatever energy you have at any given time, and it generally feels to most people that you’re not being so grateful if you’re holding it back — whether it’s through ignorance or intention. If it’s through ignorance, then only when you realize that you were holding back your energy and the ignorance is gone, can it then be directed  into gratefulness. If you’re intentionally holding it back as well then that’s the conscious goal and… you know, what can I say to someone who’s consciously holding back their gratefulness? They must know what they’re doing, and why.  If that same person, who’s consciously not doing things wants to become more grateful – I can only laugh and say, “go the extra mile,” put more of yourself into gratefulness.  Show it.

This can be accomplished in tons of ways: by writing an article, sharing food, anything really.  Giving a smile to someone on the street can have a huge effect.  In big cities, it’s fairly common for people to walk by street-musicians (buskers), huge streams of people see them everyday and a small portion of this traffic gives them money, maybe a few more give them a smile.  But we can observe a massive  portion of the population with their heads down, ignoring them and walking by.  Each of those people has more than enough energy to turn and smile at that busker. To thank him for the music he’s offering freely, even if they don’t like it or want peace and quiet, they could totally acknowledge him as a human being trying to offer his skills. And if the same people hold back out of ignorance and remain unaware, then, it’s likely they won’t be in the group of ‘smilers.’

There are millions of actions, big and small, that we can use to express gratitude, some taking negligible amounts of effort.  If people hold these actions back or refuse to think of them… they must have their reasons, and regardless it’d be good for them to know, that they have access to more gratefulness than they’re expressing. They have these options all the time, even in the tiniest moment, walking past a busker.

I’m glad you brought the subject up, it’d be interesting to get a group of people together, each of them with the intention and instructions to smile at a single musician in the subway as they walk by.  As they did this, we could observe the effect on his mood and passion and listen to any difference in his music/playing.  I imagine it’d be like night and day, perhaps seeming like some kind of miracle to him that he’d relate and share with others in his life for quite sometime.  That a stream of people walked by smiling at him and his music, as opposed to the more common  90% of people are zipping by without a glance.

If we realize, there’s something like 31 million seconds in a year, and each one of them is giving us an opportunity to express whatever we want, it becomes easier to choose gratefulness in those seconds as opposed to disgust, anger, boredom.  There’s a lot going on around: there’s a lot of people, objects, events, things to give ones attention to, most of us are used to, at least a few times in our lives, appreciating a beautiful sky.  Even less of us are used to appreciating the furniture we sit on,  and artisans, designers and craftsmen, put quite a bit of energy into manufacturing it.  And even if it’s mass produced by huge factories and machines, someone put a lot of energy into creating those factories and machines to efficiently get all those furniture to more people (and likely to provide themselves and their families with a accomplished, successful life at the same time.)  Some people, like to focus on the money aspect and make it out as if these people were motivated purely by profit. Whether that’s the case or not, somebody out there, who probably was not you, dedicated some time, and effort of their life to getting furniture into your environment. Furniture is fucking awesome, and I for one, am extremely grateful for it.  I’m grateful for the furniture I’m on right now. I’d love some even more awesome furniture. That’s a pretty odd way to end this article, but I like it. My kettle’s boiling, and I’m grateful for that too.

Interesting answer eh?