Yes, it’s been a few weeks since the last post. So much life…soooo much 2020!  While we all know everything will work again if it’s unplugged for just a bit, even that is not a complete guarantee this particular year, huh?!

Today, however, marks exactly 30 days until Thanksgiving, my personal favorite.  In an effort to jump start myself and find ways to focus on this important season of thanks and giving in the midst of an ongoing Pandemic, these next 30 days are once again about GRATEFULNESS.  As a way to express appreciation, share a word or two of kindness, and reflectively narrate on the grace of simple gratitude, there will once again be a question posted each day.  Here’s hoping this helps us pause briefly from the anxiety, stress, and frequent-overwhelmingness of this unique time in our lives.

Personally, being grateful is a feeling of appreciation for a kindness, a welcome experience of gratitude and of thankfulness.  Being authentically grateful brings pleasure and contentment on a level everyone could genuinely use in daily life.  The word itself comes from the Latin derivative, gratus, “showing grace, blessing, and JOY…” Just like daily physical exercise, we must create and cultivate mindful ways to powerfully practice daily gratitude in an effort to recharge and reboot mind, body, spirit, and soul.  As always, we start with a simple question on Day One: 

What is ONE thing you are grateful for today, only today?

Me?  RESTORATION.  Waking up to a beautifully crisp fall morning following lots of fog the past week (literally and figuratively) with regained energy.  The woods have regenerated with leaves swirling, and it’s Pumpkin Carving Day around here to boot!  My personal battery is restored from  yesterday because the blank page in the journal of life at this moment on this day is clean, crisp, and ready to unfold a fresh story!  Hopefully, restoration brings more patience, forgiveness, kindness, understanding, and generosity.  Perhaps we work to right wrongs, learn from yesterday’s mistakes, listen more, talk less, or simply put down our phones.  Hope is not lost and mercies are abundant, if only we seek them. 

Gratefully, restoration brings another day and offers renewed energy as many times as we need it!  And as my favorite Transcendentalist, Henry David Thoreau observed, “I am grateful for what I am and have…my Thanksgiving is perpetual.”   So, in this moment, take a deep cleansing breath, and gratefully name aloud your ONE thing today.  🙂