"Being grateful is a state of consciousness, a state
awakened awareness. Are we grateful for every breath we breathe?" -
Radhanath Swami
Every
opportunity that comes to us in life, we should learn to be grateful
for. We can't take anything for granted. I recently got the opportunity
to go to Mauritius and had a good experience there but, if it was not
for Krishna's mercy, so many things could have gone wrong. It could have
rained heavily and spoilt the experience. I could have got sick there
and not been able to move out. The flight could have met with an
accident. And the list can go on and on. There could have be "n" number
of possibilities to disrupt my experience there.
We
cannot take anything in life for granted. The difference between
children and adults is this - the children take for granted whatever
they get but a mature adult knows that things don't come that easily. A
child is in the mood of demanding what he doesn't have but an adult is
the mood of being grateful for what he is already given access to.
We all have the choice of still being in the mindset of an immature
child or growing from this childhood phase and embracing the mindset of a
mature adult. We need to remember that, the life we are experiencing
now is a dream for many. Yes, we do have problems to overcome and we do
have our goals to achieve but while we overcome our problems and strive
to achieve our goals, we can't afford to be ungrateful for the present
life that we already are experiencing. If we focus too much on what is
missing in our life, we miss to recognise all the blessings that is
already present.
Life is not meant for complaining and crying about what is not there but it is meant to be grateful for what is already there.
How often have we offered a prayer to God just thanking Him for all the
wonderful gifts and experiences He has awarded us with? Even while
praying to God, our mood is always to ask for something or the other,
our prayer to Him is to fill in the missing spaces in our life. We need to remember that our state of happiness and peace is directly proportional to our state of gratitude. As the saying goes - "it is not the happy people who are grateful but the grateful people who are happy". Therefore,
let us begin the day with thanking God for another day to live and end
the day thanking Him for all the wonderful experiences that came across
our way during the day. Let gratitude be our way of thinking, our way of
feeling and our way of living.
- Achyut Gopal Das
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