Attitude of Gratitude

I love November.

In college, November was usually the first time I would get to go home during the semester. For the last two years it’s meant driving 14+ hours during the nation’s most heavily traveled holiday weekend. It’s marked by cooler temps, changing leaves, rain, visits with family and friends, and thankfulness. While I love all of the aspects of this month (minus the long drive, which I finally don’t have to do this year, yay!), thankfulness and gratitude is the thing I’m really looking forward to as we enter this month.

October was hard this year. There has been some serious stress in my life in the last month, and at times, it’s been hard to be grateful about all of the good things in my life. The weird thing is, there are far more things in my life to be thankful for than stressed about. It just seems like the stressful things have more weight than the thankful things. Why is it that three big stressful things outweigh 100 things to be thankful for? Or maybe the better question is, why do we let the stressful things take up more space than the good things?

I have a friend on Facebook that posts “10 Great Things that Happened to Me Today/This Weekend/This Week”. I thoroughly enjoy reading these lists because they exude gratitude. A few weeks ago, in the midst of my crazy October, he posted his usual list of great things, followed by the same list from a different perspective. I read through the first list thinking, wow, these guys had a great vacation! I read through the second list thinking, wow, sounds like a miserable trip, everything seemed to go wrong! But the thing is, it was the exact same trip and the same events he was describing, but from a different perspective.

I tend to have the second perspective; Steven, thank goodness, has the first. His catch phrase is “Living the Dream.” When someone asks him “how’s it going?” he will almost always say “oh, living the dream!” The crazy thing to me is he says it honestly. I tried saying it once, it comes out sounding completely sarcastic. But I would love to be able to say it someday and sound sincere and genuine, because I do have a great life and I have so much to be thankful for.

So as November rolls along toward Thanksgiving, I’m going to adopt an attitude of gratitude and I challenge you to join me. I’m keeping a list of things that I am grateful for, not only to help me stop and be thankful for the good things, but to remind me in midst of intense stress of all the things I have to give thanks for. Feel free to let me know what you are thankful for this month in the comments.

Have a Grateful Month!