Grateful people are happy people

Happy people are not always grateful people

I like to think I am a grateful person because I understand that not everything is handed to us, and we have to work to earn and achieve things. I also know that I am so privileged to have parents who do so much for me and to have never gone through any serious trauma or suffering. However there is always room for more gratitude. It is important that we recognise we have so much given time, and in that given time, there is an opportunity. Whether we are going through a good experience or we are suffering, we can show gratitude to any extent in the situation, not necessarily for the situation itself.

So while we can always show more gratitude I think it’s important that we think about showing the right gratitude, or ensuring our gratitude is coming from the right place, directed at the right things for the right reasons. What I mean by this is that in showing gratitude we should not compare ourselves to others, and what they have or what they are like and what we are not or have not. By comparing ourselves to someone else, and who they are and what they have, and from that, trying to appease them and meet their standards, we fall into not showing true gratitude for our blessings and abilities that we have in our lives and appreciating ourselves for who we are. The result of this is that we don’t become satisfied with our own lives and what we have. We are not content for what we have been given, and we will always be wanting more and more, trying to achieve satisfaction and contentedness and ultimately happiness, through futilely trying to be like others.

The turn around from this is that we instigate our gratitude from a place of appreciation for what we have. For what we’ve been given. Without comparison to others, without the thought of wanting more.

When we are grateful for what we have been given — the small things, the big things and everything in between, then we can be happy and joyous. We have been satisfied and we can be happy.