A Simple Gratitude Exercise

“In friendship, there are no sorries, nor thankyous.”

This totally original and not at all paraphrased phrase could so dangerously mislead one. Guess it isn’t the best idea, after all, to base one’s life values on lines from Bollywood movies; which this line absolutely isn’t. You could however, base it on a crockery metaphor.

There’s no simpler way to put it – gratitude is necessary. And it takes one ungrateful person to affirm that gratitude, like most good values, requires conscious effort. Needless to say, you’ll surely encounter more than one of those in the journey of life. But if your close ones are anything like mine, say ‘thank you’ more than once per year and they’ll call the cops thinking you’ve been kidnapped and replaced with a misprogrammed clone. Saying ‘thank you’ isn’t the one single way to be grateful in life. What if you could practice gratitude with much less effort than uttering two words?

There’s a lot to be grateful for than you can say ‘thank you’ for. Add to this the idea that before gratitude is expressed, it must be felt inside; and we have something in our minds because of which, we don’t allow ourselves to be grateful.

It gets hard to acknowledge positive things because a lot of us are focusing on the things that are falling apart – be it in the form of damage control, precaution, anxiety or rehabilitation. Our defense mechanisms take up so much of our bandwidth that they pull us far from balance. 

There’s a fine line between being prepared against things going wrong, and actively seeking things that could go wrong and marking them on our radar. We can’t let Murphy’s law dictate our entire thought process. Zoom out a bit and you can use Murphy’s law itself to understand the sheer futility of this idea. We need to teach ourselves to stay on the good side of this fine line. We need to just do a simple gratitude exercise.

Luckily, this is the easy part. It’s actually so simple, that I can see an eye-roll coming.

Use your heart.

(Remember, I had called the eye-roll before.)

Use your heart like a piggy bank, one that can hold infinite coins.

You drive up to a traffic light and before you come to a stop, it turns green. Drop a coin into your heart. No surgery required. That’s the beauty of the metaphor. Don’t say a word, just consciously put a coin in your piggy bank. Let the coin symbolize a token of gratitude, and your heart your personal fund of positivity. You may not foresee it, but the fund shall make you rich with happiness.

So, drop a coin. I actually put a coin made of air in my shirt pocket; it’s quite optional. But you get the point.

Your fridge already has chilled water bottles and ice cubes? Drop a coin.

You slipped but didn’t fall? Drop a coin.

Did you like a meal? Drop a coin. Actually thank the cook, especially if it’s yourself.

Someone gives a shit about your life? Drop 50!

You can breathe with both nostrils and don’t have a headache right this moment? Drop a coin.

You have the internet and could read this blog? Drop it.

The author actually thinks you have beautiful eyes. He dropped a coin.

Drop a coin. Thank the universe. Be grateful, live life better. <3

Until next time.