A Blog Off post: Thanksgiving's coming, what's it to you?
The following is a Blog Off post. A Blog off is a biweekly event where bloggers of all stripes write about the same topic. You can learn more on the Let's Blog Off site . As the day progresses, a table will appear at the end of this post and it will list all of the participants as well as link to their posts.
Oh guy, it's Thanksgiving next week. How on earth did that happen already. This 12 months has shot by way of with a pace it is making my head spin however now that Thanksgiving's around the corner, I think which means matters'll be winding down on 2010.
What a year it's been. Everybody was telling me at this time last year that 2010 was going to be my break out year and in more ways than I can count it has been. When I look back on the last 11 months and think about the people I've met and the places I've been and when I add that the last two years' worth of people and experiences and wow. My life's unrecognizable from how it looked three years ago. That's fantastic of course and I am deeply, deeply grateful for how things look today.
But I turned into deeply, deeply thankful three years ago whilst the whole lot I'm as much as these days wasn't even on my radar.
Around 15 years ago, someone very wise advised me that I should "select what is so." It made no sense to me on the time, I become any person to whom life passed off.
Back then I changed into unhappy and ungrateful. I changed into expecting the next big element that in no way seemed to arrive and I couldn't parent out why I changed into so miserable. I idea that the key to happiness changed into to do the stuff that could help me get the matters that would deliver me the happiness I become looking for. A lot of human beings lead their lives that way, I can see that now.
It took me years to see that the do+have=be happy equation was a recipe for continued misery but eventually I did see it. Once I started to really think about that wise man's suggestion that I choose what's so I figured out that I had it all backwards. The answer wasn't do+have=be happy and that the answer I was looking for wasn't even an equation. The key was to be happy first. Once I was a happy, grateful man I'd do the things that happy, grateful people do. Once I was doing the sorts of things that happy, well-adjusted people do I'd find myself surrounded with the trappings of a fulfilled life.
It labored and it really works. When I start off glad the whole thing falls into area from there and it is surely unrelated to the occasions I find myself in. If my default mode is grateful then everything's a present. Since lifestyles is a series of tales I inform myself why not tell an empowering tale?
Thanksgiving always gets me present to this stuff and I think it's absolutely fantastic that in the US we have a specific day set aside to be grateful. Five other countries around the world also have a day set aside called Thanksgiving but a day to be grateful goes a lot deeper than that. Human cultures have had harvest festivals for as long as there have been human cultures and something tells me that I'm not the first person to trip over the idea that being grateful is a good thing.
Maybe sooner or later I'll locate an excuse to prattle on some greater about a way to be grateful to nothing mainly.
So happy Thanksgiving folks. The assignment was to write about what it is to me and everything I just wrote is it. What's Thanksgiving to you?