Gosh it's easy to get carried away pursuing the next thing! I've fallen into the trap, time and time again, of seeking and aiming and striving for the next experience, or thing, or level of income.
Now, I don't believe there's anything inherently bad about wanting something more for ourselves, but if our focus is solely there and we forget to look around at all the wonderful things (including people) we already have then life can become a little bit empty.
In recent times I have come to realise and appreciate just how fortunate I am. While I've had a gratitude practise informally for many, many years and formally (as in written down every day) for at least a year now, I got a new appreciation of just how lucky I am when I watched our fellow Hivians in Cebu and nearby towns and islands (in the Philippines) live through a Super Typhoon.
Photo by our fellow Hivian, Protean Creator (aka Roxanne).
Suddenly, for many of them, things that they had taken for granted, like shelter, power and water were no longer easily available. As I read post after post of their experiences I also got a chance to reflect on my life. I soon realised that I too take things like my big, sturdy house (shelter), my endless supply of electricity for our lights, laptops, phones, TVs and fridge (power) and the abundance of water we have for drinking, showering, washing and toileting all for granted.
Yes, sometimes I remember to be grateful for electricity in my daily journalling, but often it's other things like seeing the sun rise or the latest present that my partner bought me or the fact that I got to talk to my Mum on the phone that day and that she's doing okay.
And it's when I reflect on all the things that I am grateful for (even if I sometimes oftentimes forget things that I use multiple times every day like this computer) it's then that I realise that if I had to choose just one thing that I could be grateful for about all else, it's actually that I have an option to choose at all.
The fact that being alive and being a human being inherently comes with the option to choose is, I think, our greatest gift.
(Unless you go even deeper and be grateful for life itself, but sometimes life can be demonstrably difficult and at those times more and more people hate life rather than love it. So that's a harder one to be grateful for I think because it's impossible to hate your life and be grateful at the same time; these two emotions cannot co-exist. But I digress...)
It is the option to choose how we see a challenge that helps us navigate that challenge.
It is the option to choose where we put our attention that brings us our results in life.
It is our option to choose that influences how we feel about the life we have.
So given the choice, I choose to be grateful right now for choice, because that's where all my power comes from and feeling empowered and powerful feels far better than the alternative.
Q: What are you most grateful for right now?
This was one of the two questions posed in the Ladies of Hive community this week. This was the one I chose to answer. (See what I did there? 😉)
Are you a lady? Do you want to participate in this week's Ladies of Hive contest? You'll find all the details here. And if you're like Sam Smith (@samsmith1971) you can totally write an awesome post in answer to either of the two questions available. You'll thank me later. I'm sure of it 😂😊