I’m often grateful.
I’m happy and healthy and like most of my friends and family, I’m in the top 1.5% of wealthy people in the world and have the right to speak freely. Obviously.
I end my yoga class by choosing one thing I’m truly grateful for to meditate on for a minute or two. Well, I don’t actually choose it, it chooses me – I just bow my head and earth my hands and by the time I breathe out – there it is…..
The other week ‘I’m so glad my Mum and Dad are alive and I can just call them’ popped up.
My minute mediation was over run with ‘what?’, ‘seriously’, ‘where did that come from?’. But when a friend called a few hours later to say our friend’s dad had just suddenly passed away…. I called my Dad just to say hi and I love you and I was really grateful that I could.
Chatting to my gorgeous girlfriend in Melbourne a few months ago, I asked how things were going with her and her answer shook me.
‘Things are pretty busy’ she shared ‘But at least I don’t have to walk 2 kilometres for fresh water to drink!’
Wow. Suffice to say, the rest of our conversation was extremely humbled with no room for day-to-day drama.
The next day I bought homemade stir-fry in for lunch but I had no rice.
Then it hit me..
Not only could I ride in an elevator downstairs to the food hall to get hot steaming clean rice that I didn’t have to fight for, steal, beg for or think of who I needed to offer my rice to before myself (my ailing sisters, brothers or my surviving children), I could choose brown or white depending on how much I valued the type of nutrients I chose to place in my body and I could pay for it with a mere fraction of the money I actually have which is just a fraction of the money I could actually borrow and buy great big things with.
Then I could heat it all up in the microwave and sit and eat in peace without fear of a bomb going off, my children being taken away from me or gun happy militia raiding my village.
When being grateful, try to go back to the very basics – food, shelter, water, health, peace and love – these are some the basic building blocks we often overlook when being grateful.
