Gratitude is riches. Complaint is poverty.
Doris Day
He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.
Epictetus
March habit was to express gratitude on a daily basis as a family. Expressing gratitude is finding things to be grateful for, regardless of how our day goes. As a family, we sat together, towards the end of the day (except for two days – see Challenges section for more details), to express gratitude and discuss what we were grateful for that day. I still call this a success even though we missed a couple of days. Life happens and it might throw some curveballs at us, but that doesn’t mean we stop our journey. When we fall down, we take few minutes to dust ourselves, then we get up and go. Whether we have completed each and every session is a different story 🙂 (see Challenges section for more details). We started with mentioning two things each of us were grateful for and eventually we bumped it up to three.
What is Gratitude?
Appreciate how far you have come in your life. Recognizing that there may be some people in the world who haven’t experienced what we have had.
Gratitude doesn’t mean that you don’t want to create abundance in life. It doesn’t mean we don’t want greater aspirations. On the contrary, Gratitude is the foundation of abundance. Gratitude reminds us that we have come so far because of hard work, dedication, focus, passion. This in return helps us to re-energize us to grow more with more focus, determination and more drive. If we are ungrateful for what we have, we are approaching life with deterrence, fear, doubt and these will hold us back.
Why did I choose this habit?
The world we live in today is way more advanced compared to that of my parents. We can afford to do a lot of things and provide a lot more to our kids compared to what we experienced when we were growing up. We are now able to live in bigger homes, go see places multiple times a year, have easy access to buy food, clothes, accessories, grocery etc. on a click of a button, air conditioning, heat, cars, and numerous other things. Yet, we can’t say we are happier. Kids today feel entitled. It doesn’t matter how much money, how many things we have, we want something more that we don’t have or others have. On the other hand, we see people who are content and happy regardless of what and how much they have. Why is that? I think it boils down to a habit of being grateful and content with what we have and with what we can do to the best of our ability and not compare to anyone else. We all know that it isn’t that easy to practice this, given the kind of world we live in. So want to give it a try and make it a habit in our lives.
Why does this month’s habit involve family?
Three reasons:
- I have three themes for my 2023 goals – personal, professional and family. My January and February habits mostly revolved around personal and professional themes. So I wanted March habit to be about family.
- I started a gratitude journal last year. I did it consistently for few months, then stopped and resumed it again in December 2022 and I loved the experience of taking a pause and noticing things I was grateful for each day. So I wanted to do the same as a family.
- A couple of times in the past, we tried to do a gratitude jar as a family, where we wrote two things we were grateful for daily on small pieces of paper and dropped them in a jar. The idea was that we can read them randomly once in a while, especially in not so good times, to remind us of what we have. That habit didn’t stick. So wanted to make it simple and do it verbally this time around.
What was the outcome?
Thoughts described here in this section are purely mine and not necessarily represent those of my family’s.
- As surprising as it may sound, before starting this habit, there would be days and may be weeks where we would be all busy with house/school/office work and would not get to talk with each other as a family. Ever since we started this habit, we are spending at least a few minutes and sometimes, it would be go up to 30 minutes, just sharing stories from our day with each other. I loved every one of these sessions we had.
- Expressing gratitude daily served as a reminder to find good in every day, regardless of how the day went.
- Last time we tried this gratitude practice, an year or two ago, my daughter was very reluctant to participate and had a hard time finding things to be grateful for. But this time around, to my surprise, there were a few days where I was the one who found it hard to come up a list but not my family.
What were the challenges?
- Since the four of us have to do it together, it was a bit hard to coordinate schedules and ensure we meet and chat.
- In our family, we all are highly opinionated people 🙂 So there were three days where one of us got upset during our discussions and left the room. And hence we couldn’t finish the gratitude session. I initially got upset but later realized that is life! We need to acknowledge it and move on. These aren’t habits that we are doing only for 30 days and forget. These are life time habits (hopefully). So a bump or bruise on our way should be ok
- There were couple of days I wasn’t feeling well and went to bed very early in the evening and hence we couldn’t chat. Again, this is life! We move on.
Here’s to family time!
Cheers,
Sirisha
