The Happiness Path of Gratitude
“Happiness,” says Denis Waitley, “is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.”
Nobody, of course, is happy every minute. We’re people, after all, subject to the whole range of emotions. We tumble into pits of misery and boredom; we get sucked into anger and frustration and doubt.
But it’s the darkness that makes the light so beautiful. It’s sorrow that makes us long for happiness and that pushes us forward in its pursuit.
Once we find it, though, it’s exactly what Waitley describes. It’s the singing of the spirit bathed in grace, in gratitude and love.
It’s the awareness of our connection to the essence of being, the existential joy that undergirds and permeates all that is.
And just as grace and love and gratitude bubble up from the depths of happiness, they also serve as pathways to its shores. In the grace of kindnesses freely given, joy arises. Love, in any of its colors, links us to happiness at its very core. But it’s gratitude that offers us the simplest return to happiness when we have temporarily lost our way.
Begin naming the things for which you are thankful, the things that you appreciate in your life, and the healing of gratitude will begin to dissolve whatever barrier stands between you and your joy. Gratitude turns your attention away from the empty places and illuminates the abundance in your life. It guides you from a focus on what you think you have lost to an awareness of what you have left and what you have left unclaimed. It redirects your sight away from the seeming obstacles that block your path and shows you new possibilities.
And the magic of it, the power of it, lies in the fact that once you begin to name the things for which you are grateful – the possessions, the abilities, the strengths, the relationships, the talents, the potentials, the pleasures – the more things you see to name.
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