An Attitude of Gratitude!

This quote has been around for sometime now and it has such a pleasant sound to it, an attitude of gratitude. A speaker I was listening to recently said something interesting that I wanted to share. What they said was that gratitude is not attained through simply having an attitude around it but rather it is an action, a decision we must make consciously on a daily basis to step into that place. The concept of having an “attitude of gratitude” would lead one to believe that it is possible to go through life minute by minute looking at life through a gratitude lens. The reality is that we drift in and out of consciousness, meaning that much of life is done on autopilot, and we are not truly present to most things we do repetitiously. This simply due to the fact that once we develop a pattern of doing anything the novelty of it wears off and we require less presence to attend to the same task that previously we had to focus on and give our full attention. This is when we appear to take things for-granted but in reality they simply drifted into the background with so many other things. The conscious decision of being present will afford us the opportunity to acknowledge the many gifts that our life holds for us, and in that space we can come to recognize that gratitude is a decisive act, not simply an attitude.

David Gilks Your Fellow Traveler