Finding Joy
Grateful to let go of second-guessing myself
So happy that my sister and I reconnected over kale and chocolate
Grateful for those good people both long ago and today who know to appreciate every moment of life
Trying to decide where gratitude might take me this month, I absentmindedly fiddled with a mug that I kept on my desk. It clattered out of my fingers, and as I grabbed for it, I suddenly remembered why I had it in the first place. Ironically, I’d put it on my desk a few months ago to keep in constant sight (though of course I’d stopped seeing it)—a reminder of how gratitude for family can help you find joy and calm even in the midst of despair.
Now I held the mug carefully in my hands, taking in the pretty teal background and delicate Japanese-influenced white flowers. Based on a painting by a famous artist, the graceful and beguiling image might lead to easy assumptions about the guy who painted it. Surely he wouldn’t be a tormented genius who cut off his ear and spent time in a mental institution. But actually, he was. Vincent van Gogh had painted Almond Blossom while suffering his deepest misery.
I’d seen the real painting for the first time when Ron and I visited Amsterdam a couple of months earlier. One day of our vacation fell on King’s Day, a national holiday a lot like July Fourth only with hues of orange (Holland’s official color) instead of red, white, and blue. The city teemed with revelers drinking beer, celebrating in the streets, and taking party boats up the canals. Ron and I had fun watching for a while, but merrymaking wasn’t exactly our style. I felt slightly embarrassed that I’d spent weeks planning the trip and not known we’d be there during the most raucous holiday in Holland.
In silver-linings mode, we made our way through the huge throngs and got to the Van Gogh Museum, famously crowded on even a normal day. But with everyone partying outside, nobody wanted to be inside. Triumph! The museum was deserted. We had the exhibits practically to ourselves.
“Very grateful that I forgot to check dates and planned our vacation over King’s Day!” I said to Ron with a grin.
We strolled through the halls, gazing in close-up awe at famous paintings we’d seen before only on posters. We encountered the Zen-like painting Almond Blossom (the basis for my mug) hanging in an upstairs room. Van Gogh had painted it in 1890, at the end of his life. Seeing the pretty picture on the wall startled—because the genteel, elegant painting was surrounded by two anguished works he had done at about the same time, both filled with loneliness and angst. One showed a wheat field with a reaper, and the other displayed jagged trees cut down by lightning at the sanitorium garden, painted in saturated red. (“Seeing red” was van Gogh’s metaphor for anxiety.)
In the midst of van Gogh’s gloomy visions of mortality, isolation, and despair, he had found a way to paint this beautifully tranquil and life-affirming picture. And here was the story: His brother, Theo, and his wife had just had a baby whom they named Vincent. Even as he struggled with depression, the original Vincent van Gogh was so touched that they named the baby after him, he wanted to express his gratitude. He painted the blossoms as a sign of hope and thanks.
In the gift shop afterward, I found myself moved all over again by how an expression of gratitude let van Gogh (briefly) break through his emotional pain. I decided to buy the mug as a reminder of the power of gratitude to change a mood.
“You could decorate the whole house with that message,” Ron said, pointing out the napkins, plastic plates, pencils, espresso cups, notebooks, eyeglass holders, mouse pads, and salt and pepper shakers with the same Almond Blossom motif. Most people were probably attracted to the pretty design. For me, it seemed like the most beautiful gratitude letter ever created.
One other story from that trip. The next night, with the city turned quiet again, we strolled down a beautiful canal-side street after a great day. The only downside had been a just-okay dinner that the waiter had taken forever to serve. I’d been deciding among three restaurants and changed the reservation several times, and now I apologized to Ron for having picked the wrong one. Ron told me not to worry, but I couldn’t stop. I felt my anxiety building, that I’d made it a less-than-perfect day. “I should have gone to the one the concierge recommended,” I said querulously. Ron tried again to reassure me, then finally stopped in his tracks.
“Hey, Ms. Gratitude,” he said with a grin. “We’re holding hands walking by a canal on a gorgeous night in Holland. Would you like to appreciate that—or worry about the restaurant?”
I laughed, because of course he was right. Second-guessing myself—a favorite hobby of mine—didn’t fit with grateful living. Time to give it up. I’d unwittingly picked up the habit from my mother, the master of “should have.” Though when I was growing up, she said it shoulduv. Until I was eighteen, I thought it was a word. My father got upset when he heard my mother ranting about what she (or he or we) “shoulduv” done. Shoulduv, coulduv, woulduv! he would shout at her. Can’t you stop it? She couldn’t stop—or at least she didn’t—but now I needed to banish “shoulduv” forever. I’d learned this year that gratitude didn’t depend on the right events or even the right decisions, but how I processed them. Gratitude gave you back control. I didn’t have to pick the perfect restaurant (or hotel or flight home) to appreciate the vacation and be grateful I was here.
The psychologist Barry Schwartz at Swarthmore College has made a career of trying to prove that too much choice doesn’t make us happy. We get stymied when presented with too many possibilities (so repeatedly change the restaurant reservation) or when our expectations get pumped too high (with so many restaurants in Amsterdam, I could pick a great one!). Once we do make a selection, we’re less satisfied than we might be—because we wonder about all the choices we didn’t make. Would a different one have been better? The only way I could think to square the problem was to be grateful for the choice I’d made. So now I hugged Ron and we continued walking down the street in a new mood. I wouldn’t ruin the night by ruing the restaurant. I could be grateful for right now, this moment together by a canal, and still find a place tomorrow night that didn’t take three hours to serve dinner.
—
After Amsterdam, I kept thinking about van Gogh and whether gratitude really could ease—even briefly—depression and despair. I had only the evidence of the three paintings hanging on the museum wall, and my interpretation of them. So I spoke to Dr. Jeffrey Huffman, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital who has done research on the effects of various treatments on patients who are depressed, hopeless, and suicidal.
“Writing a letter of gratitude was the single most effective positive intervention we found,” he told me. (They hadn’t looked at painting letters of gratitude.) He thought one reason might be that feelings of hopelessness lead to feeling alone and completely self-focused. Gratitude turns your attention outward, serving as a reminder that you do have connections and people who care about you. (Maybe even enough to name their baby after you.)
“Realizing that someone did something kind gives so many positive emotions to unpack!” he said. “If you’re being grateful, you must have been worthy enough for someone to pay attention to you. You do have somebody in the world who cares about you, and you’re not alone. The feeling of gratitude can have a profound effect on improving the mood of someone feeling isolated and worthless.”
Holding the mug now, I thought about Vincent van Gogh, lifted briefly from his depression as he expressed his gratitude to his brother, Theo. I found a book of van Gogh’s letters, many of them thanking Theo for sending canvas, paints, and money. “Even when it’s a success, painting never pays back what it costs,” he wrote sadly. In early 1890, he shared Theo’s joy at the new baby. “I have just today received the good news that you are at last a father . . . That does me more good and gives me more pleasure than I can put into words,” he wrote. He immediately began to paint Almond Blossom for the baby’s bedroom, his expression of life, hope, and gratitude. Despite the torment Vincent van Gogh experienced, he created a lasting ode to family love.
Most of us can’t create a masterpiece to offer thanks for a kind act, but the paintings on that wall were proof of gratitude’s mood-altering powers. Angst, madness, and despair on both sides—and joy and beauty in the middle. Feeling grateful for family had allowed van Gogh to find a pocket of calm in the midst of a sanitorium. Just think what it could do for the rest of us amid the very different craziness of everyday life.
—
Families can be a great source of joy—as well as a font for a whole lot of annoyance, irritation, and (on the baby front) exhaustion. Babies help everyone around them to stay in the moment—what is now called “mindfulness.” When a three-month-old is shrieking, your only thought is whether he needs a bottle, a cuddle, or a diaper change. You’re not plotting about the future or worrying about the past. And mindfulness and gratitude are very much two sides of the same thin dime. To stop and fully be in a moment is what also allows you to appreciate it.
When our older son, Zach, was an infant, I had heard the rueful comments from an older generation about how “it all goes by so fast.” Even though the days then seemed like the longest in my life (starting with four A.M. feedings), I accepted that someday I’d look back at how quickly they’d passed. One night after I had done the laundry in the miniature washer-dryer stacked in the corner of the kitchen, Ron helped me fold the clothes, and he picked up one of the baby’s tiny undershirts in his big hands. He stared at it with wonder.
“I love him so much I even love his T-shirts,” he said.
We looked at each other and then down at the little garments, grateful and awed. Neither of us had much sleep and the baby’s needs seemed endless, but that flood of love trumped all.
“I never want to look back and wonder why we didn’t appreciate every moment when it was happening,” I said fervently.
The joy for what happened right now remained our theme when the children were little. (“As long as they’re happy, don’t worry about anything else,” my mother-in-law used to advise.) It’s probably not possible to appreciate every moment of life, and I can easily recount too many times when I got irritable or worried or impatient that I wouldn’t mind getting back to try again. But the mindful appreciation that came from having a new baby dominated my intentions. I refused to believe that Proust was right when he said that “the true paradises are the paradises one has lost.” The real paradise should be the one you were living and appreciating right that very moment.
A lot of people who knew about my gratitude project had started sharing their own stories with me—and I was delighted when I heard from a new mom named Sharon Kunz whom I had worked with a few years earlier. Talented and smart but so thin that we all worried about her, Sharon (ironically) fell in love with a chef named Erik and blossomed after they got married. She eventually moved to New Haven with her husband, got an interesting job, and then had a baby. Now Sharon told me that baby Isaac was three months old, and though he was perfect (of course!), he had been having some tough days and nights. He would scream and scream through the night for reasons she couldn’t figure out, and then the next day he’d be tired and fussy. He had done that one Sunday night, and Monday was so difficult that Sharon started to despair. But then came Tuesday.
“At about eight A.M., Isaac and I climbed into bed with a stack of board books and we snuggled and read for half an hour,” she told me. “It was a moment of perfect happiness and I was almost overcome with gratitude. There were more moments like that throughout the day—having a coffee at our local hangout and watching him nap in his stroller as we walked home from the bank. That night when he was in bed, I curled up on the couch and started to write him a letter about how grateful I was for our wonderful day.”
I admired Sharon’s ability to turn a stressful time into a happy one. But babies don’t always read the script that would provide the golden-glow ending to a story like that. While Sharon was writing her letter of gratitude to her baby, he woke up screaming. Three weeks later, the letter was still “only about seventy-five percent finished,” she said. “But I do think that the tough days make it easier to be grateful for the good days. With life in general, right? The more hardship people have suffered, in my experience, the easier it is for them to be grateful for the little things—which, of course, are the things that, added up, comprise our whole lives.”
Lucky Isaac. I had no doubt that Sharon would finish that letter of gratitude. It didn’t matter if Isaac ever read it—Sharon wanted to write down and remember the moments with her baby that gave her joy and gratitude. Focusing on those would make those cranky nights easier to handle (and eventually forget). I was also struck by her insight that it’s the little things that make up our lives. Snuggling in bed with your baby or folding his undershirt amid a wave of love are the memories worth keeping.
Using gratitude to stay calm can change your relationship with grown-up family members, too. Anthropologist Margaret Mead once said that sisters are “probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.” My older sister, Nancy, and I seemed to have gotten stuck on the “competitive” part. Now we both wanted to change that. By some odd confluence of the universe, my new focus on gratitude coincided with Nancy’s discovering mindfulness. My ambitious and successful businesswoman-sister had started meditating every night and taking yoga classes. She even had a new consulting company focused on mindful leadership. Since both of us were trying to see the world through a more positive lens, we wondered if that filter could change our relationship to each other. We talked about trying to become the kind of sisters who talked and shared and cared. This month seemed like a good time to take the effort to the next step.
So on an early December Friday, I took an Amtrak train to Washington, DC, for a “sisters’ weekend”—a phrase that, for me, hit about an 8 on the Richter scale. Hang out together just for fun? The last time I remembered doing that, she was nine years old and I was five. A lot of water had passed under many bridges since then, and we had our resentments and piques. We could each make a list of what the other had done wrong. But focusing on past problems led nowhere, and we had nothing to lose by trying to be positive and appreciate each other. The gain might be much-wanted sisterly support.
My late-afternoon train from New York was an hour late, and I called Nancy a few times with updates. As we got closer (and slower), I knew she was waiting at the station, and I got more and more frustrated. Wrong start to the weekend!
I’m trying to stay calm, I texted her. At least I’m looking out the window at a pretty sunset. Take a look.
You’re right! she replied. The sun is burnished red and the sky is still very blue. That doesn’t usually happen.
See how lucky we are that I’m late? We might have missed that.
We are lucky. Travel mindfully, sister.
And gratefully!
I put away my phone and smiled. A couple of years ago, the late train would have made both of us stressed and tense and snappish. But unless we moved to Switzerland (where the trains were always on time), we needed to rely on our new attitudes—to stay in the moment (mindfulness) and appreciate the pretty sunset (gratitude). With that approach, irritations didn’t seem so bad.
When I got to the station, we gave each other a big hug and headed out for dinner with two of her grown daughters.
“I heard you had a really slow trip,” said her youngest daughter, Emily, as we sat down for sushi.
“It took a long time, but . . .” I stopped. Did I really want to waste time recounting the details of a late train? I smiled and gave a little shrug. “I’m here now and so glad to be with you. That’s what really matters.”
“You sound just like my mom!” said Emily, with her usual high spirits. “She never talks about bad stuff anymore. She just says, ‘I’m here now!’”
For Nancy not to talk about bad stuff seemed as amazing as—well, as my not talking about bad stuff. Dr. Huffman had told me that some people seemed wired to appreciate life while others had a harder time. Being more grateful predicted what he called “superior mental health–related quality of life”—which included higher energy levels, better social connections, and happier moods. In one research study, he had charted people who scored high in gratitude in red, those who scored low in blue. When looking at levels of certain positive behaviors and positive mental health, the red lines ran across the top of the page, the blue lines far below. “We’d like to change blue people to red ones,” he said. (Though he joked that as a Democrat, he never thought he’d say those words.)
I suspected that Nancy and I (and probably our big brother, Bob, too) had started out as blue people and were working as hard as we could to become red ones. Because we’d grown up with a negative mom (all that shoulduv), gratitude didn’t come naturally. But each in our way wanted to turn that around.
For Nancy and me, that became the message of the weekend—appreciating the good in the moment rather than fussing about the past. Since Nancy had found her new level of calm through meditation, she wanted to share it, and on Saturday morning, she took me to her meditation class. About a dozen people sat in a pleasant room, at ease on comfy mats and cushions, eyes closed, bodies relaxed. I liked the lovely leader, but my mind didn’t go where directed (or undirected). I understood the point of meditation, but it just made me want to giggle (certain things bring out my fourth-grade side), so I resorted to journalist mode. Afterward, Nancy said she had heard me taking notes.
“I used a soft pen hoping I wouldn’t disturb you,” I said, apologizing.
“You didn’t. I just felt bad, because if you were writing, you weren’t getting the full experience.”
I explained that I used the hour for my own kind of stress relieving, which involved gratitude games with myself. For example, I heard a dog barking on the street below, breaking the quiet of the room. At first the noise was irritating, but then I practiced flipping to the bright side. I felt grateful that my ears worked well and I could hear a dog, and I thought about our own family dog that we’d loved for many years. (Ah, Willie, the genius Portuguese water dog who thought he was human.) The barking became a lovely sound rather than an annoying one. And by the way, sitting in the room, even not meditating, I felt grateful to be sharing an experience with my sister and getting to understand a new side of her. What more could I want than that?
Nancy nodded and told me her own story about gratitude. One recent night, she had a horrible evening and had been stuck in a hospital ER helping someone for endless hours. (The details are unimportant and too complicated to recount.) She finally left at three A.M., exhausted and frustrated, and walked out to the parking lot. Nobody was around. The outside lot was completely quiet.
“And then I looked up at the most beautiful moon I’ve ever seen. It was huge and seemed to fill the whole sky and had a different color than usual—almost blue.”
She stood in the parking lot a very long time, gazing at the sky. “I felt incredibly grateful to be in that place at that moment and see that moon. It occurred to me that if not for the events of the night, I never would have seen the moon at all. I got in the car to drive home, and it followed me, bright and bold and huge and blue. I watched it the whole time, feeling very lucky.”
I told Nancy that the real luck was that she had an attitude now that made her appreciate the moon and the moment. At an earlier time, the Nancy I knew might have walked out of that hospital so angry and frustrated that she barely glimpsed the sky. But now, ready for a positive view of life, she left the hospital and found beauty in the night.
A beautiful sunset when I arrived late, a blue moon after a horrible night. “Isn’t there an expression about a sea change? I think you’ve undergone a sky change!” I said to my sister.
We spent the rest of the day walking in a pretty park and talking and talking. Nancy had been through a recent divorce, but instead of knocking her down, it had given her hope for a fresh start. She remained very close to her daughters and felt lucky that they had rallied around her. We stopped to look at a rushing waterfall in the park, and against the scenic backdrop, she admitted that she had started to have a new view of what really mattered.
“I get up every single morning and think how grateful I am for my girls. I told them that once and they said, ‘Every single day? Really?’ They thought I was exaggerating, but it’s actually true,” she said.
At one point, Nancy brought up an incident between us that had bothered her from years past. I had no defense—it happened long ago. Siblings typically let resentment linger, reliving when the other person let us down, ignored a need, said the wrong thing. But instead of recalling incidents gone wrong, I thought we needed memories gone right. I suggested we could restore our relationship by focusing on the times together that we felt grateful.
“Here’s my gratitude memory of you,” I said. I recounted a childhood night long ago when our grandpa had just died. Scared and sad, I couldn’t get to sleep, and Nancy took out her music box, one of her most cherished possessions, and let me play the tinkly tune.
“You’d never let me play with your music box before,” I told her.
“You were so little, you would have broken it!”
“But you let me that night, because you knew it would cheer me up. I was too young then to say thank you, so let me say it now.”
Nancy nodded, getting the point. We’d wasted a lot of time over the years annoyed by each other’s mistakes and failings. But how much better to appreciate the moments of kindness and warmth—and hold on to those.
“How about you? I guess if you have no grateful memory, we might as well give up,” I said.
But Nancy recounted a time when her three children were very young, she was in a tough situation, and I flew down from New York to see how I could help.
“I really appreciated that. So many other things got in the way afterwards, but I knew that day you really cared,” she said.
I put my arm around my sister and gave her a hug. Holding on to memories like the night-of-the-music-box or the day-of-flying-down gave us something to appreciate again. Gratitude might not make us into the Olsen twins, but it reminded each of us that we had a sister to count on. With that as the new basis for sisterhood, we could move forward.
We went back to Nancy’s pretty house and for dinner, we made a feast of the kale and quinoa she cooks and keeps fresh in her fridge. We kept talking and talking, and at a little before midnight, we decided to celebrate. Neither of us drinks much, so Nancy pulled out a bowl of chocolate-covered ginger (we couldn’t eat healthily forever), and we lifted our chocolate and toasted being sisters.
Nancy, who did not cry easily, admitted that thinking about our new friendship brought tears to her eyes. I dabbed at my eyes with a tissue and admitted that I felt exactly the same.
“Though it may be your cat making me cry. You do know I’m allergic, right?” I asked.
Nancy laughed and stroked Toby, more the size of a bobcat than a house pet. I liked dogs and Nancy liked cats. But with all the goodwill suddenly flowing between us, we could work it out.
—
The next day, when I got home, I stayed quieter than usual. Ron asked what was wrong, and I told him about my concern that I hadn’t made a big enough impact this year. I needed the grand gesture that would make my gratitude forever meaningful. He looked at me in amazement.
“You’re joking, right?”
“No, not at all.”
“Okay, let’s think it through. You made our marriage better, reconciled with your sister, got a new view of your career, and encouraged our kids. And by the way, you wrote a book so that other people can do the same thing. Isn’t that enough for you?”
My old instinct was to say “Not enough!” but I caught the fierce look in Ron’s eyes and smiled. The philosopher Epictetus had been my guide through parts of this year and he spent a lot of time discussing how we can be most content if we focus on what is in our power. Anxiety comes from wanting what we can’t control. He gave the example of a lute player who is happy when playing and singing to himself—but gets anxious when he goes on stage for he not only wishes to sing well, but also to obtain applause: but this is not in his power. In modern terms, that meant not driving yourself crazy about the things you couldn’t control or hadn’t yet accomplished.
“I think what I’ve done better be enough for now,” I told Ron with a smile.
I had started the year making myself (and him) unhappy by looking only at what I lacked. After this year, I understood that coming from a position of gratitude, you could still want (and get) more for yourself, your family, your career, or the world. But you enjoyed more along the way. No road led right to the top and some didn’t get there at all, but gratitude at least let you take the scenic route.
Living gratefully had started out as a lark, and once I decided to write a book, the yearlong project could have slipped into being just a literary device. But as the year went on, the project had lodged deeper and deeper into my heart and soul. I wasn’t just reporting—I was also feeling. Something changed in me. Gratitude affected how I looked at every event that happened. Being positive and looking for the good had become second nature—and that made me much happier. I still got into the occasional bad mood, but I snapped out of it quickly. My much-appreciated children called regularly and stopped by often. Ron and I spent a lot of time sitting at dinner together talking about how lucky we were to have each other. In fact, we weren’t any more blessed than we had ever been—we just noticed it more. And the noticing made us closer and happier.
I thought about grand gestures for a couple of days, and that weekend at our country house, I went out for a long walk by the river. There had been an early snowfall and the trees glistened with lacy patterns of ice and snow. Underfoot, the snow was soft and crunchy, melted enough for easy walking, but not yet wet slush. I paused to notice how beautiful the woods appeared, the elegant simplicity of the stark winter trees against the pale blue sky. But then I let my mind wander. I pondered Henry Timms’s suggestion that I needed some dazzling finale for my year, and I thought about going to Nicaragua to build houses for the poor.
Final scene: Janice with a hammer and nails!
But no, that wasn’t me.
I admired the people who expressed gratitude with grand gestures, but my expressions, smaller and more personal, made their own kind of impact. My positivity this year had touched others, and maybe each of those people had found some peace and satisfaction that they could pass along too. I hadn’t changed my essential nature to be more grateful, but none of us really needed to do that (nor can we, I suspect). Instead, I’d recentered and refocused. Maybe I was 40 percent more positive and 50 percent more grateful, and that in itself was dramatic and life changing.
From a high point on the mostly flat trail, I looked out at the river, clearly visible through the bare trees. I realized that this year I had started noticing the details of life and nature in a different way—sunrises and sunsets, rushing rivers, the warmth of the sun on my face and the prickling briskness of the wind on my back. I even smiled to think about the dog I’d heard barking during my sister’s meditation class. I had made myself stop often to be grateful for every sensation, and now it came naturally, the simplest pleasure of simply being alive in a vibrant world.
Heading back home, I stopped at the small cemetery just outside the center of town and walked among the old-fashioned headstones tilting in the mild afternoon sun. Slim pieces of stone with simple inscriptions from the late 1800s carried names like Ebenezer Eaton and Rebecca Alcott and George Bull and Edwidge Stone. I tried to imagine the lives of the solid New Englanders who had died at fifty-two and sixty, a full life back then, or lost a child at eighteen days or three years. One man lived a fuller life: “72 years, 7 months, and 28 days,” the inscription said. I thought how he must have appreciated every moment on earth to count each day. Or maybe it was only after his death that a relative thought to cherish those days and be thankful for every one of them.
Wandering among the stones, I felt like I’d stepped into act 3 of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town. Many of the townspeople have died, but they remain onstage, sitting in chairs that represent their places in the cemetery. The play’s young heroine, Emily, has died in childbirth, and she is stunned to find herself among the dead. She asks for the chance to return to earth for one day. Just one day! While warned not to, she decides to go back and experience again her twelfth birthday.
Our Town is always performed without props—“no curtain, no scenery,” Wilder wrote in his stage directions—and the characters mime the action of setting a table or shucking peas. (It makes it a perfect play for schools—not a lot of extra stage expenses.) But when I saw a production at a downtown theater in New York, the director made the last scene, the day Emily returned to relive her twelfth birthday, come to vivid, sensory life. As Emily’s mother cooked breakfast in the kitchen, real plates clattered and freshly cooking bacon crackled on the (working) stove, its rich aroma wafting through the audience. Her mom barely noticed her as she rushed to get the meal on the table, and the ghostly Emily understood that all the colors and smells and sounds—so incredibly appealing now—had meant nothing to her and her family when they actually lived the day.
“Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you,” Emily says.
Horrified at how careless we are about savoring our time on earth, she asks to go back to the cemetery. It is too painful to see people ignoring the world and not appreciating our fleeting moments of life. I saw that downtown production on three occasions, and each time, tears rolled down my cheeks when Emily discovered how foolish and oblivious we all are, how we don’t know to be grateful for the simple gifts of life and love and cooking bacon.
Can we stop and revel in the moments of daily life, or will we only regret when they have been lost? I had too often let the wonders of life be an unseen background, and now, before it was too late, I wanted them center stage. My year of living gratefully had changed me in so many ways, but mostly it had given me the simple ability to experience joy for almost any reason. I now knew to appreciate this moment and the next one, to truly feel the warm hugs of my children and the love of my husband. To be grateful for the ice on the trees and my footprints in the snow. They will not be here forever. Neither will I. But that doesn’t matter. This moment does.