We know so much! But do I make thank-you a way of knowing myself and my life?
Thank-you has a potency that, coupled with acceptance, effects powerful changes in our lives.
Thank-you's can be directed at people in our lives (to those who share with us or give us something) and thank-you's can be directed at life itself.
This thank-you to life itself, just for living us, breathing us, thinking us, speaking us, is the all-powerful instrument that shapes our mental attitudes to meet the requirements of a truly effective, affirmative life.
A thank-you habit of mind saves us from taking our lives for granted. It's far from grovelling or a tugging-at-the-forelock breadcrumb acknowledgement:
The thank-you habit is the celebration of the feast itself that is present to our everyday experience when we quite simply still our chattering minds and use our faculties to see, to hear, to touch, to smell, to experience.
While it may or may not be spoken aloud, this celebration springs from an internal process that is critical to our survival as whole beings. Without the capacity for gratitude or with an impaired ability to express it, we cripple ourselves by entertaining and expressing thoughts about how limited our lives are. Without a sense of celebration, we're sterile spiritually, and we stunt and twist our mental and emotional development.
As children, most of us look at the world around us with spontaneous wonder, from clouds to tea caddies. Eventually we're largely trained to dismiss this spontaneous contemplative time as wool-gathering, as a waste of time, as not paying attention. All too often we're easily shamed out of our natural wonder, for it lacks the productivity or verbal sophistication to justify itself in a noisily material world.
When we alienate ourselves from our natural spontaneity, wonder and calm, our spiritual muscle weakens and may even waste away.
When I take a walk, the breeze that touches my face is the same power that circled Kilmanjaro, that roared through the Antarctic, that whipped waves into stormy heights across the Southern Ocean.
The very air I breathe comes from green and growing life forms, plant beings. Our interaction is creation itself, creation of planet earth's atmosphere, creation of life itself in me, whichever I I happen to be.
Creation itself, far from being a remote event, is everywhere, everywhen. It's moment to moment now, breath to breath, heartbeat to heartbeat awareness of our wholeness in the whole.
Just look around right now, at the kitchen, at the office, at the traffic. Look at the bathroom if that's where you are. Look at what you're doing with the fresh eyes of an inter-stellar visitor. Even the coffee machine gleans new lustre when we look with eyes stripped of world-weary expectations. Even traffic reveals fresh patterns.
Seemingly ordinary acts of living, just given that clean, clear look, generate celebration. Even our sleep can generate celebration and gratitude both in the rest it affords us and in the powerful representations of our dreams.
We can celebrate the infinity of creation when we make muffins or write a letter. We can celebrate its eternity when we glimpse it in ageless hills and oceans, in cloud-shadows racing each other across our landscapes since endless eons, in stars scattered lavishly across our night skies.