12/1/14 The
Season of Gratitude
We call the
time around Thanksgiving and through the New Year “The Holidays.” Personally, I
am glad that we start our holiday festivities with Thanksgiving of the bounty
of the year’s labor and we end them looking forward to a new year. Without
commenting on any of the less savory aspects of the origin of the Thanksgiving
feast, I am thinking more about the symbolism it can have for us today. As I
think about the spirits of thanksgiving and gratitude, I am struck that they
are grounded in the present and the future, not in the past. As Neal A. Maxwell said, “We should certainly
count our blessings, but we should also make our blessings count.” Certainly,
in being thankful, we are thinking of the conditions that took place (past
tense) but we are expressing thanks in real-time today and creating a condition
of the mind that is moving us into the future at that very second.
Living in
the nation we do, in the age we do, with the jobs and health insurance we have,
surrounded by people who care for us, with the resources we have at our
fingertips, we have many reasons to be thankful. Maybe our challenge is to be
thankful at this specific moment, and to move forward living gratefully by intentionally
becoming a blessing to someone else. I can think of no better or no more future
focused way of living because we know that making a difference for others pays
dividends into the future. Cicero summarized it well, “Gratitude is not only
the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.” Will our choice to live gratefully have a
serious impact on the future? It certainly can’t hurt.
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