Gratitude

Fear, Gratitude, Kids, Parenting

Instead of covering subjects and topics in-depth as I have in the past, I’m trying something different. These are my observations from each week last month. It makes me pay attention, and ponder even more…

Ah, to NOT be a kid again…
Week 1: I realized this week that, although youth may rule here in the West, I am grateful to be an adult and have already gone through many life experiences. My daughter had a lunch meeting with her school principal to discuss the drama club and its needs (she was invited by an upper classman). She fretted over what to wear, what to say, what to eat. In essence, she was nervous and intimidated by authority (which, thankfully, still has some influence). She got through it all fine, as I knew she would, but it made me appreciate not having to been a teen or young adult worrying about dealing with older people or authority figures. I’m well into adulthood, phew!

Who are the meanest commenters? ADULTS
Week 2:man computer As it turns out, the age group that should act the most “adult” – doesn’t. Surprised? Recently, I was listening to a younger podcaster interviewing an even younger food blogger (both considered Instagram “influencers”). They agreed that, when receiving comments/feedback from their posts, TikTok users are the least mean, IG is second, and Facebook and Twitter have the meanest and nastiest commenters. Who typically has accounts to these two outlets? ADULTS. Come on, FB and Twitter adults, grow up and be mature (or maybe that’s not a thing anymore).

Your idea of what’s best for your kid versus what is truly best for your kid…
Week 3: As parents, we often think “we know best,” but do we always? If you’re living in Ukraine and your city is actively being bombed and you decide to leave, then yes, you do know best. But if you have an idea in your head about what your kid’s life is “supposed to be like,” but your kid disagrees (or worse, is too afraid to tell you), is that the best thing for him or her? It’s a fine line that we walk all the time. To think that we, as parents, know everything about our kids’ lives and can control them until they’re eighteen then set them free to make their own sound decisions is setting us up for disappointment. The first question to ask when making decisions for your kid is, who is this serving? If it’s you and you have no idea what your kid wants, I would re-think it, or better yet, ask your kid.

Nukes and more nukes
Week 4: Did you ever find out information that you wish you didn’t know? Ignorantly, I did not know how many nuclear weapons were out in the world (13,000). I had a vague idea about which countries had them, but found out that Russia and the U.S possess skeletons-bomb90% of them. The other countries are China, France, U.K, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea (that’s in order of the most to the fewest). The more startling fact is that scientists think it would only take about 100 of these nukes to make life on Earth unsustainable (due to air quality, lack of sunlight to grow food, etc). That’s it, 100! And yet, being the ridiculous Earthlings that we are, we have 12,900 more than necessary. Surprising and yet not surprising, no? Let’s hope they stay un-detonated.

That was the month of March in a nutshell.

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Gratitude, Self-awareness, Self-improvement

Here is a re-post from four years ago (with some tweaks and updates) that still applies today.

Much has been touted about the benefits of thinking with gratitude. If we can be truly grateful for what we have, we are supposed to feel happier, be less stressed, and experience life with more joy, overall. It’s true. If you stop and think about two things you are grateful for that happened at the end of the day, be it the guy who let you in on a crowded freeway or that you got your kids to school on-time with no complaint from anyone, a little gratitude can go a long way.

But sometimes it’s just too hard to be grateful, or to truly feel it in difficult situations. If you’re behind on bills and have nearly run out of money, thinking about how grateful you are that you’re not starving to death in a third world country, or that you don’t have some terminal disease, doesn’t really help matters. Granted, you might feel truly grateful for those things (I know I do), but it does not change your attitude or situation for the most part.

A shift in perspective when gratitude isn’t working is to think in terms of abundance. This means seeing what you have instead of what you lack: abundance instead of scarcity. Many of us see our lives in terms of scarcity only – what we don’t have, what we want but can’t get, what we think we will never have. Advertisers bombard us  with the latest things that we just have to have, be it a gadget or a lifestyle, and show us how much better they are with those things. Social media can show us (often falsely) of the perfect life we think we “should” have. We can’t help but think we are lacking, and when we try to be grateful for what we do have, we still don’t feel truly glad.

Thinking with abundaabundancence in mind means looking at situation and seeing the possibilities in it instead of the lack. Back to the example of being behind on bills and money, we can see the piles of bills and the small stack of money with which to pay them, or we can see the possibilities we have in creating more wealth and paying those bills (which could be anything from a second job to a yard sale to selling unwanted collectibles on E-bay), and we can be grateful to have the opportunity to do those things. We can see how to make that money stack grow instead of continue to shrink. Will that solve all of your money problems? Not yet, but it is a start, a way towards seeing the world in terms of offering you opportunities instead of stripping you of everything and just being glad you don’t have to worry about eating cat food for dinner or contracting Ebola.

Steven Covey states it well, “The Abundance Mentality… flows out of a deep inner sense of personal worth and security. It opens possibilities, options, alternatives, and creativity.” This can be difficult to do when you had a bad day at work, you find dog crap  on your shoe (again!), or all of your dieting has equaled to weighing more instead of less, but instead of going to extremes and trying to be grateful for things that you can’t really connect with, try to stop and see the abundance in your life. That may mean just accepting that things aren’t perfect right now, but trusting that they will get better, reasoning that you usually have more good days than bad at work (the dog as well), and that you do actually feel better and your pants are looser even if the scale doesn’t say so.

thanksgiving-table-1888643_640One current example in my life is my choice to take a break from alcohol (more on that in a future post). As I have now noticed, alcohol is everywhere and people are drinking it everywhere too. Instead of seeing all of the beverages I cannot (choose not) to drink, I will focus on the abundance of non-alcoholic drinks that are available (even if it means providing my own). So, as the holiday comes and we sit at the table with our families and friends, try not to focus only on the one person who antagonizes you or triggers you. Instead, notice the many people you enjoy being with, the table covered in food, and the one day out of the year when we overeating is encouraged!  Abundance abounds (when we choose to see it).

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