It’s that season of Thanksgiving.
I love Thanksgiving. The food, the football, Fall, a chance to reflect on the year. It’s easy to think our thanks is relegated to this one day. But really we should be grateful all year. I’ve found being thankful is something that is often the first to depart in the midst of life. We’re busy, stressed, frustrations happen, disappointments. The car breaks down, the kids get sick on vacation, we don’t get a promotion, a friend gets difficult news. All the perfect plans we have made and counted on are suddenly ashes. And our attitudes become the first casualties.
I hadn’t really noticed how much work gratitude takes until I became a mom. Once my kids were old enough to voice an opinion, it quickly became apparent it didn’t take much to ruin their day. A toy goes missing, a playdate is cancelled, they aren’t allowed to just eat chicken nuggets and fries. Then they start throwing around the words, “never” and “always” and it sounds like they have the worst life ever.
Suddenly, any fun they were having is gone. All joy is taken from their faces as they focus on one thing: what they don’t have. It used to frustrate me until I applied the admonitions I gave to my children to myself. We can choose to be happy, even in the midst of disappointment. We can choose to be grateful in what we have, even while we mourn something that was lost. It’s all about choosing where our focus will be and dwelling on gratitude not complaining.
We don’t like to think of ourselves as ungrateful because we usually don’t like to be around complainers {am I alone in this?!} And when we aren’t thankful for what we have, it tends to manifest itself in complaining. Have you ever considered that adults have the same emotions as children? The difference is that we’ve learned we can’t physically display it in tantrums — maybe I should say most adults have learned this. When something disappoints us, we probably don’t sit on the floor screaming that life isn’t fair but we might tell our friends all our woes, state nothing good happens to us, everything is against us, etc. In those moments, we are complainers, seeing what we don’t have instead of having a grateful heart.
November is a wonderful time to form a habit of cultivating gratitude. We are reminded to, '“Give Thanks” through home decor, plates, pillows, and garlands. And while kids might already be writing Christmas wish lists, it’s the perfect opportunity to talk with them about being thankful for what they already have before they go wanting more.
On my next post, I’m going to give a few suggestions for cultivating gratitude in yourself and your kids this November. They aren’t difficult or time consuming. Just gentle reminders that choosing thankfulness makes all the difference.
Photo by Freshh Connection on Unsplash