A LIFESTYLE OF GRATITUDE

"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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