Gratitude is the act of appreciating what you have in life. It’s putting words to the goodness that is all around. A practice of gratitude can shift where your attention goes and where your attention goes, it grows.

I’ve been a part of online challenges before where daily you post the things you are grateful for. I’m currently sharing gratitudes with a friend.

It’s not always easy. I don’t always feel gratitude and honestly it shows sometimes in what I share but I have noticed times when I don’t feel particularly grateful but as I start to list off the things I am grateful for, that can shift.

The best gratitudes are ones where you feel genuine gratitude or joy as you identify them but the practice of gratitude causes you to look for those moments.

The other day I was heading to work and I did not feel particularly grateful but as I drove into the gravel yard of my workplace, I noticed that the deep ruts dug in from the moving of equipment had been leveled over and in my little VW Beetle car, I did not have to navigate to try and avoid them. I felt grateful. I shared that gratitude with a coworker, who smiled when I did.

It was a seemingly small thing to notice and share but I did feel particularly grateful for the worker who took spent time doing the work. I was grateful he was assigned to do it.

It made the morning just a bit more enjoyable and it gave me the spark to search for more.

There are many things for me to be grateful for each day and yet it sometimes is much easier to focus on the thing that aren’t working. The difference is what I choose to focus on and what experience I choose to grow.

A gratitude practice does not have to be verbal with someone else and it does not have to be regimented to a specific number of things.

When asked how he is, one of the owners of the company says often, “Well, I’m breathing today.” It never fails to make someone else smile. There’s a lot of truth in that statement. The alternative is just not the same.

Of course there are always big life things that are easy to be grateful for and yet, when we fail to stop and acknowledge them, to share them, or to record them in some way, they can easily be lost to memory. Acknowledging and commemorating them anchors them more deeply allowing the energy of gratitude to infuse our being.