Shouting to the Moon...

There are gratitude journals, podcasts, poems. T-shirts with gratitude etched across, posters and quotes. We are inundated with the idea that gratitude is a virtue, an important part of life - a road map to a well-lived life or at least contentment.

We try to be thankful. We do.

A second here, a second there, we strive to focus on the good, and then someone flips us off on the road or our phone buzzes with a past due work deadline. As we fall asleep, we have gratitude flicker in our dreamy hearts, only to evaporate when our to do list saunters in, jolting us awake again.

And we write stories, day in and day out, nights and weekends too.

Fantastical tales of beauty and love, grim tales of hardship and muck. We decide where to focus, minute after minute. My health misadventure gave me plenty of opportunity for horror stories, filled with woe and awfulness. To get out of bed, I had to tame my mind...employ a laser focus on the bright possibilities and cheerful outcomes, my better angels.

So I prayed (and I pray) every single day....to the angels, the archangels and all the company of heaven, a lovely troop of helpers...if you need them, look to the skies with a simple greeting. Our prayers to them are stories - one chosen here, another picked there.

This week, I began my prayers by saying everything beautiful and sweet that had happened the previous day...and my gratitude for it all. A mental list, spoken out loud while driving. If you had inquired before these prayers...I might have said this, that or the other pesky, moaning, fretful sort of thing.

But as my thank you list got longer and longer, I felt lighter and lighter, sort of surprised at its length. One happy something is the reappearance of hair on my head...as well as a bountiful, huge bunch of other goodness.

Sometimes intention is necessary, rather than assuming gratitude will come along to us, magically, with no real effort. It is an easy discipline to speak out loud all that is right - practical and quick, simpler than a gratitude journal and it takes us a minute or two. And we are often in the car...looking for something to do...right?

Try it every single day. Big things, little things, teensy things, shout it to the heavens and around. To the moon, to the stars, to that driver in the car next to yours.

As Larissa Gomez reminds us:

"Being thankful is not always experienced as a natural state of existence, we must work at it, akin to a type of strength training for the heart."