What Should I Be Grateful For?
When you begin a gratitude practice you might find yourself unsure what to be grateful for. Though it sounds like a simple exercise to “just pick something you’re grateful for,” there are many reasons why it might not be that easy:
You are in the midst of a significant life challenge.
You’ve suffered a recent loss.
You don’t feel grateful for anything.
You honestly can’t think of a single thing!
Don’t feel bad if you’re struggling. As I mentioned in “Rewiring Your Brain for Happiness,” our brains are biologically wired to detect danger and to be alert for anything that could harm us. For this reason, we automatically miss being aware of things that we could feel grateful for.
When you start your gratitude practice or if you’re struggling, keep it simple. Do you have a roof over your head? Do you have transportation? Can you walk, talk, see, hear, or breath? Do you have family? Do you have friends? Do you have food to eat? We tend to take the basics of life for granted, but they are a perfect starting point for a gratitude practice.
In the rest of this post, I’d like to offer you some ideas that you can use to observe the blessings in your own life. I’ve grouped items into a few categories to get your creative juices flowing. Use these ideas or come up with your own.
People & Pets
Who are the people and pets in your life that bring you joy? Who is the first person you want to call when something great happens to you? Who do you want to call during the rough times?
Here is a list of people that you might be grateful for in your life:
Parents
Siblings
Grandparents
Aunts, uncles, cousins
Co-workers
Friends
Acquaintances
Teachers
Mentor
Pastor or Spiritual leader
Spouse or Boyfriend/Girlfriend
Children
Keep in mind that you can be grateful for someone even if they are no longer in your life. Both of my parents are deceased, but I often feel grateful for the loving care they provided me when I was growing up. I’ve lost friends due to life circumstances but memories of them remain in my grateful heart. I’ve loved and lost many cats1 over the course of my life and the memory of each one still makes me smile.
At the moment I have one fur baby, Meisha, that shares my heart and my home. Here’s a photo of her. She is quite a character and makes me smile often!
Do you currently have a pet that makes you smile? What specifically about your pet brings you joy? Does your pet comfort you when you are feeling sad?
Physical Things
Even though physical things may not be what brings us the most joy in life, they are often the easiest to identify at first.
Here are just a few from my own life that consistently bring me joy:
my home
my bed
warm blankets
indoor plumbing2
my books
colorful pens and paper
cards people have sent me
my flutes (traditional and Native American)
computers
the sunroom in my house
my garden
my clothes
What physical items bring you joy? Even if you don’t own the item (e.g., you rent your home or lease your car), what things do you use often? What physical items in your life would you miss if you didn’t have them?
Experiences
Being happy “in the moment” is often about the experience we are having. Here are some of my favorites:
Drinking a cup of coffee
Being in nature
Walking in a park
Giving or receiving a smile
Shopping
Reading
Visiting family
Socializing with friends
Visiting new Toastmasters clubs
Attending meetup groups
Volunteering at Hospice Austin
Making music on my flutes
Participating in a drum circle
Writing a newsletter, blog, or book
What experiences do you enjoy daily? What experiences do you remember when you want to feel joy? What are your favorite experiences?
Intangibles
While some of the items in this list could be called “experiences,” as well, I’ve created a separate category to help get your creative juices flowing. In my own life, here are some items that I might group into “intangible” gratitudes:
Life
Health (at whatever level it is)
Getting married or getting divorced3
Listening to music
Engaging in a hobby
Making a new friend
Achieving a goal
When we consider intangibles like “health,” it’s easy to fall into the all-or-nothing trap. Even if you have serious health concerns, for example, it’s useful to be grateful for what is good about your health. If you’re still alive, you can be grateful that you are breathing and that your heart is still beating — even if you need help from medical science with those functions.
Opportunities
We often overlook the opportunities in our lives when we think about gratitude. I’m presenting a straightforward list here, but I’ll bet you can think of more uncommon opportunities in your own life.
Going to college or trade school
Finding a job
Joining Toastmasters
Holidays and vacations
Having “me time”
Borrowing books from a library
Learning about happiness
One of the most significant opportunities for me occurred when my family moved from one small Pennsylvania town (Shirleysburg) to another (Rimersburg) when I was eight years old. In our new town was a library. I’d seen school libraries before, but this one was bigger than any library I’d ever seen! For me, having access to more books was a joyful experience. It also opened up even more opportunities for me over the years, like preparing me to enter college.
What opportunities in your past are you grateful for today? What opportunities have led you to become the person you are or to have achieved something you’re proud of? What might not have seemed like an opportunity at the time, but turned out to be later?
Silver Linings
Sometimes what we initially view as negative, a crisis, or a catastrophe in our lives becomes one of the biggest opportunities of life. The challenge is in identifying these “bad” things as positive in some way. For now, I’ll call these the “silver linings” of our negative life experiences.4
Here are a few ideas from my own life:
Losing my father at age 15 taught me how to be self-sufficient at a young age.
My first divorce taught me that I am a much stronger person than I ever imagined.
My mother’s terminal cancer taught me how to accept things that are difficult in life.
The ability to find these silver linings of life is a subject that I’ll discuss in more depth down the road. For now, I just want you to know that it’s possible to find gratitude even in the darkest of life’s moments.
You might have noticed that this post was a bit lengthier than what I normally write but I felt that at least some of you might need a reference point for beginning your gratitude practice. You can bookmark this page or save the link to it if you want to refer back to it for ideas.
The list of things for which we can be grateful is indeed endless and I’ve barely scratched the surface with this post. When we begin opening our eyes to gratitude, we may see only a few things to be grateful for. As our awareness expands, we will find that in every moment and no matter what we’re doing, there is something to be grateful for.
I’m a “cat person” so you’ll hear a lot about cats at Primrose Ponderings.
I’m old enough to remember using my grandparents’ outhouse! You haven’t really lived until you’ve had to worry about getting splinters in your butt when going to the bathroom. :)
Life is about perspective. Even a divorce might be a welcomed event for some.
I’ll spend more time talking about how to be grateful for difficult experiences in future posts. That, too, is a skill that you can learn with practice.