An attitude of gratitude

When you count your blessings every day, it just might change your life

Mary DeTurris Poust (Courtesy photo of CINDY SCHULTZ)

Although I began a sporadic gratitude practice many years ago, when my three children were young, I took up the practice in earnest a little more than nine years ago. I keep a cheap notebook on my nightstand, and every night before I go to bed, I write down three things from my day that made me pause with gratitude or smile with awe. Sometimes it’s something big — a child landing a job, a seaside vacation, a sick loved one returned to health. But most times it’s little things that make my list: a cup of coffee sipped quietly on my deck, the cut of a kayak across a clear lake, the sky turning pink and orange glimpsed in my rearview mirror.

When I really committed to this practice, I decided to number my blessings. Each time I began a new notebook, I would continue the count so that day by day the abundance of goodness in my life would be obvious just from the number in the margin. Earlier this month, my count hit 10,000. Even in the days leading up to that landmark, I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to see that number on my list. I don’t have to re-read the entries to feel awed by all I’ve received. The number alone says it all.

If this spiritual practice seems too simplistic or cliché to be transformative, I assure you it is both/and. Yes, it is simple (and thanks to social media, somewhat cliché), but the simplicity is what helps make it so powerful. Oftentimes we don’t take up a spiritual practice — such as long-form journaling — because it can be intimidating or time-consuming. A gratitude practice takes almost no time, two minutes at most, and it requires no special training or equipment or even a book or podcast to get started. It doesn’t even require a life full of excitement or big plans. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, the more mundane the entries, the more powerful the practice.

It’s easy to be grateful for fancy dinners and vacations, job promotions and big events. What’s hard and more transforming is to be grateful for the things we typically overlook: the way the clouds move across the sky, the sight of a child blowing bubbles out the back window of a car at the light in front of you, bright pink Adirondack chairs perched on a gray balcony, an unexpected card in the mail, a text from a friend that makes you laugh out loud. The little moments add up to a big payoff you won’t see coming until it has already arrived. A gratitude practice will flip your perspective from one of lack to one of abundance. Rather than seeing your life through a lens of what you don’t have or what you still need or what someone else has that you want, you begin to see your life through the lens of overflowing goodness. God provides too much, more than we can count, every day, even on the hard days, and suddenly we stop clinging so tightly to the things we used to use to measure success in our life.

Benedictine Brother David Steindl-Rast, who has a TED talk on this topic and an entire website dedicated to the practice of gratitude (grateful.org), puts it best when he says that a gratitude practice does not mean we are grateful for everything that comes into our life, because clearly there will be things for which we are not grateful, but that in every moment it is possible to find something for which we can be grateful.

So, pick up a notebook, as fancy or simple as you like, and before you go to bed tonight, write down three things. Then do it again tomorrow. In less than a year, you will have counted 1,000 blessings. I can almost guarantee this simple-but-profound practice will transform your life in ways you can’t possibly foresee.

Mary DeTurris Poust will be leading the annual Stillpoint Retreat at Pyramid Life Center Sept. 11-3. Information: https://notstrictlyspiritual.com/events.