It’s Great To Be Grateful During The Holidays

If you’re feeling stressed, overwhelmed, or a bit tired during what can be the commercial lunacy of the holidays, gratefulness can put the jumper cables to your soul.

We need to swim against the flow of noise, overeating, and buying and giving stuff, to find gratefulness.  But it’s worth the effort, really.

I love the explanation of Brother David Steindl Rast, a way cool monk (he hangs with the Dalai Lama) who travels the world talking about gratefulness.

He says it is the opportunity that life affords each of us to be grateful that counts. Brother David nailed it when he says that it is not the happiest people that are grateful. Too often people who are given everything are unhappy because the want more of what they’ve been given or something else. He says it is the grateful people that are truly happy.

Words of Wisdom

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For those of you who are regular readers of this blog, you know how much I love quotes.  I look for them everywhere.  To me, they’re like finding a little jewel on the sidewalk.  I put it in my pocket, walk away and delight in it later.  The best of quotes seem to capture something about their author that you don’t get from reading one of their books.  Not necessarily better, but qualitatively different.  Sort of like the difference between a movie and a photograph.  They draw different things out of us.

Here are some good ones I’ve recently come across for your enrichment:

Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are your own fears.

-Rudyard Kipling

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can read. 

-Mark Twain

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. 

-C.S. Lewis

The time is always right to do what is right. 

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

To laugh often and much; to know the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden path or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived.  This is to have succeeded.  

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

All that is gold does not glitter; not all those that wander are lost

-J.R.R. Tolkien

Now I’m off to a barbecue!  Enjoy the beautiful summer weather.

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