(Frey Freyday is simply a bunch of inspirational, motivational and other quotes meant to make you think, reflect, smile, even laugh a bit. Hopefully helpful, useful stuff….)
Gratitude – [grat-i-tood, -tyood] – the quality or feeling of being grateful or thankful:
You can’t be grateful and angry simultaneously. You can’t be fearful and be grateful simultaneously. So gratitude is really the reset button.-Unknown
Most of us never stop to consider our blessings; rather, we spend the day only thinking about our problems. But since you have to be alive to have problems, be grateful for the opportunity to have them. Bernie Siegel –
WORD TO LIVE BY:
Gratitude – Give thanks for everything, big and small, good and bad.
As I look back over the past years, I’ve been downsized a few times, I’ve worked at places that were not fun, I’ve worked with people that were not ideal, and I’ve been at banks that were not very good about approving many loans.
Then I thought that I’m grateful right now; grateful to be working with nice people- I really like the team at my job, I am grateful for my family and friends, I am grateful for my health and such. I am grateful that 87 years ago today, my late father was born.
At this time of year, many of us have or know some young people that are graduating from something to another thing, and I’m grateful my youngest is moving from high school to college and I’ll soon be an ‘empty nester’. (I thought that was for old people.) I am grateful for all of that. Life isn’t perfect but I am grateful for the tough times and times like now, which seem to be good.
I know that this sort of thing has been covered in countless articles and blogs by others. In many ways we all know that giving thanks and showing gratitude makes sense and that we should do it, but many of us don’t consistently do it. It does work…..
Here is an exercise that I recently read, and something I don’t do often but hope to do more often…fyi….
“There are so many things that we take for granted. We live in a free country, we have food, shelter, education, safety, we have beauty in nature and in each other, we have so many people in this world that want to help, heal, give, teach and share. Look at your coffee cup in the morning. Someone made that cup, created it so that you could enjoy the coffee. Someone took great pain to package your coffee in a secure, healthy, clean, sanitary container. People worked years to improve the freshness and flavor.
Most of us have so many people that care for and about us….friends, family, co-workers – you’d be surprised who cares for you. Think about all of the people, strangers included, that somehow touch your life each and everyday. When we have what we call a ‘bad day’ we are often in a negative mindset or one of fear or scarcity. We are looking at, focusing on what we don’t have, what we lost, what we are lacking. It has been said that wherever there is appreciation, there will be duplication. It can be said that what we focus on expands – so if you are grateful for something, you will have more of it. If you have gratitude for challenges and ‘bad’ things in life, it helps to re-frame them. An experience that we could say is ‘bad’ can instead be thought of as experience, education, wisdom. We learned from the situation, didn’t we? We are wiser and stronger for making it through. Because of that experience, we are better people, and that’s worth being grateful. Think about it, we all have things in life that we may have considered ‘bad’ as they were happening to us. If you instead think that life is there happening for us rather than to us, and once we gain some perspective on it, we can see that that same event may in fact be a good thing for our life. When you look at a problem like that, it is no longer a ‘bad’ one. Gratitude helps us re-focus. We can’t be fearful if we’re grateful. We can’t be angry if we’re grateful. We can’t feel scarcity if we have gratitude.”
On this Memorial Day weekend, certainly I am glad for all those who have died while serving in the United States Armed Forces.
P.S. My older daughter is in Finland with a group, the Finnish word for gratitude is kiitollisuus
Frey Freyday was actually born out of something I created called “Words To Live By” (WTLB). Going forward, I will now not only share the quotes, as you may be used to receiving, but also a related (WTLB). In 1999, when we had our first daughter, I was contemplating how I would raise my new beautiful child, and I was thinking about how I can best educate her and my other children about values, morals, and other key thoughts about life. School offers education. Religion offers some values and morals. Parents offer most of it, sometimes intentionally, sometimes accidentally.
So I created a (WTLB) book, like a dictionary, which lists things like honesty, love, persistence, etc. with a definition that I created, with my wife’s input. I then turned it into a workbook with one word per page and space below for notes. For years we would discuss with my two daughters and they would draw pictures and make notes in the blank space. I may share some of those images with you. As they got older, they were less inclined to draw and more open to quotes and references from adults, hence where Frey Freyday came from….
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