Gratitude

It's Tuesday-before-Thanksgiving. My company included Wednesday as part of the paid holiday this year, so there's already one reason to be thankful! This may be an easier essay than I thought. Hmm!

This is the first "Daily Droppings" post on my new blog. I'm going to try--already I'm seeing the image of Yoda saying "You must do, or do not. There is no try."--I'm going to write a blog post every day, allowing for reasonable exceptions. In order to accomplish this goal, some of them may be very short, poorly-punctuated, and generally disorganized, but that's okay. It's about building a muscle.

The idea of gratitude is one I've been exposed to my whole life, but if I'm being honest--and if there's one good reason to journal in the first place, it's to express one's self honestly, I figure--it took until the later years of my forties to begin truly feeling thankful for so many things. It isn't that I wasn't happy with how life was going, that I didn't enjoy the advantages I've had. It's that I must have felt like I somehow deserved it.

That's the part that's changed, I guess. Do I deserve to be happy? Sure. Why not? I'm down with that. But if I deserve to be happy, then doesn't everyone else, too? And if so, why have I received these benefits while others have not? Luck?  

Happiness probably isn't the right word, either. I know it's a relative thing. A person can be happy in almost any circumstance. It depends a lot on their own experience. For instance, I thoroughly believe that money doesn't bring happiness--or, at least, extra money doesn't make a person more happy.  

What I've come to realize is easy it has been for me to arrive at happiness, and how unlikely it is that I was born into a situation where that would be the case.

I'm grateful to be so damned lucky.