When the going is great…. when the going is tough….. when it is tough to say where am I going….. when the tough days are going away or approaching like the daily monsoon storms at our hill town…I need my slices of gratitude cake.
Nothing works half as well as a well-timed reality check of gratitude. I know this has been said by all and sundry—by gurus and gyaanis and get-well-soon-experts and great presidents and good talk show hosts, but it still holds true. Something like we need to breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon-dioxide.
Decades ago, when life was crashing all around me ( somewhat like those movies where skyscrapers crumble down into dust and little Wall-e came trundling along) and I would be sitting at a car-wash in Muscat, watching the Honda getting scrubbed and polished, and wondering how did things become like this and why me and where did I go wrong and so on and so forth, I would fish out an empty envelope from my bag ( those were the days of slow-mail, my friend) and write down the chaos of my mind. Strange are the ways of the mind—I would start with a tirade against the world and end up listing the good things in my life. I would end up with a smile on my face, a lift of my shoulders and a spring in my step. The scrawl-filled-envelope would be thrown into a dustbin and I would come out of my worry bin.
Envelopes are few and far-between, car wash meditations are a thing of the past, but the mind still takes a joy-ride on the why-me and what-now turntable. The best of plans go astray, the challenges continue to surprise me (the challenges are expected, what surprises me is my ability to handle them!) and I go up and down with passing seasons and months. Gratitude slices remain a permanent item on my mental menu card and I can be quite aggressive about passing them around in company..so what if some of my friends just sigh and roll their eyes when I begin on the good things in my life.
I find the world if full of gratitude seekers and sharers now! People write about it , there are apps galore to download on your phone and there are reminders tucked into articles and FB updates. These are good times!
So what are my current favorite or constant gratitude slices?! After the definitive slices of good health, great family, generous friends with gigantic hearts ,gastronomic treats, grand sunsets amidst the Himalayas, garrulous chats with caring souls, and the grand celestial gift of having “enough”, I can add a few more million things to that list!
Yes, my friend, the gratitude cake is colossal. And it just continues to become bigger and bigger.
Latest additions
- Waking up to azure grey skies above and green grey hills below—with a busy bulbul singing bits of her song in the middle of her distracted dawn routine.
- Completing an attempt to bring the blues and clouds into this long scarf. Grateful for completing those long, long rows of mindless knitting, even more grateful that the torment is over.
- Enjoying the after-effects of an undignified fall on the slippery, rain-soaked stairs at home. I have a mild sprained ankle.
Mild enough for me to continue driving and living.Serious enough for me to stop exercising and therefore, get a bonus hour of reading my morning blogs. Noticeable enough for me to get some delicious sympathy and the most amazing tree ripened mangoes from a friend’s farm.