I am learning to be more grateful

We as humans have this incredible ability to adapt to our environment very quickly, and while this may seem like a superpower, at first sight, I found this to be a double-edged sword, and it was cutting me more than I realized.

I can’t remember the exact moment when I started thinking about the whole concept of gratitude and how to live more gratefully in general. But at a certain point, I started noticing small things I didn’t see before. Sometimes, I see people that I know get excited about something that I used to get excited about as well, but I don’t anymore.

Although I don’t think that I am an ungrateful person, I did start to realize that I normalized a lot of small things like experiences or just things that I owned, around me, so easily. It felt like the more I got used to something, the more my gratitude for it faded away. I didn’t feel better because I owned something that someone else didn’t. However, I started to get jealous because someone else did find this happiness in something that was already available to me, happiness that became blind to me or something.

We all wear this pair of glasses that can make each one of us look at the same thing but see it differently. Giving it a different kind of value or something, and these glasses turn out to have a name. They’re called perception, and while I don’t think that we as humans can change this given ability to get used to things so quickly. I do think that we aren’t born with a perception of things, but we create it along the way, so we can take control of it and we can change it. And that’s what I wanted to do, I wanted to change mine because when I started to think about this whole concept, I started to really see the power of gratitude.

I think happiness and gratitude are strongly connected, and we can find happiness in simple things that are always around us, instead of always seeing happiness as a reward after having achieved something. I don’t think that finding more gratitude, like many things in life, always works with a step-by-step manual that guarantees success.

Just recently, I have been experimenting with ways to get better at being more grateful. I decided to make very significant changes to my lifestyle which was being deliberate about being happy and becoming a nice person. While I think I am a nice person by default this time around I wanted to accept and understand that it’s okay to be nice and realized that a lot of people in this world aren’t nice and that I might just be one of the few who is truly nice.

Being more grateful sounds so simple, but I still think this is a process because, in this world, we get constantly flooded with impulses, telling us to forget what we do, forget what we have. That right there, in the distance is what will make you happy. But, by just changing the way we look at something, we can often find so much hidden happiness in the things that are right in front of our eyes.

Until next time, stay safe! Hand to head, Salute!

DISCLAIMER, this article is a combination of research I have done over time. Some words might sound familiar, probably because they are. I took sometime to put together things I have learnt about myself within the past month and content that helped me understood myself better. Doing so helped me express myself more, and better. Sometimes, its in people’s words you find yours.