Daily Gratitude: “When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.”

Anytime we can do anything with cheer and gratitude, it’s a win win situation.

It’s hard sometimes to give cheerfully when we’re bombarded by GoFundMe pages and requests “to just give a little”. We can feel surrounded or suffocated by all the “asks”.

But maybe there’s a way you can figure out how to be happy about whatever you give, no matter how small the amount. You can try to imagine yourself in the position of the person asking for help. Remember, too, that most of the time the person asking is embarrassed and desperate enough to do a GoFundMe campaign.

Think of their situation as emotionally as you can. That will most likely help you want to give more freely. Learn something from all those shivering puppies you see in the ASPCA ads.

It also helps to think of multiple ways you can give – not just money. I’ve talked about that a lot here. But it’s fun to come up with unique giving opportunities. Many of you have posted some of those ways before.

Just as importantly but maybe a bit harder is the need to accept gratefully. We can’t always give. We have to be able to accept things without qualification. It’s hard to receive when we’re so used to giving. It’s as if that protects us. We put up barriers to letting people get inside of us. They might see our vulnerability and we can’t have that can we?

Let others feel as good about giving as you do. It’s not fair to deprive others of the wonderful, cheerful feeling of giving. And you never know. You might actually learn to like it.

Daily Gratitude: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Read this again. Then go look in the mirror and say it to yourself.

Why?

For two reasons:
1. The most damaging injustice we do is the injustice to ourselves. The self-criticism, the doubt, the inner talk, none of which does any good in your life.

2. You may be walking around thinking that there is nothing you can do because the world is such a mess of injustice. That’s not true.

We have a responsibility to make the world around us as filled with justice as we can. It’s that easy. Don’t lie. Be kind. Treat others fairly. Help others out. Don’t fight or argue. Turn the other cheek.

How hard is that? Why don’t we put a lot of effort into this? Why do we use our telescopes instead of our microscopes?

Our telescopes help us see beyond our small little universe, watching the rest of the world, the world with situations and conditions that we have absolutely no influence or control over.

Our microscopes enable us to see our own little world, that world where we can dole out justice on a daily basis. Where we can influence the lives of our selves and of others.

Think about how you can be more just than you’ve ever been. Then make a determination every day that you will distribute that justice as best you can today!

You’ll be surprised at what this does for your life.

Daily Gratitude: “Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”

So many times we think we can just be in the movie theater of life, sitting in the audience, sipping our sofa, and munching on the buttery popcorn. Just observing, hardly ever absorbing, and certainly not “doing”. The movie ends, we get up and depart the theater. The bright sunlight blinds us to the lessons we just learned or should have learned. We go about our business as if the last two hours never happened.

How often do you sit and reflect on what’s happened in the last day, or week or month? I see. You’re too busy. OK. Too busy to learn from the lessons that the universe has bestowed upon you? Lessons that could change your life in such a positive way you can’t even imagine? Too busy for that?

We evolve, we grow, all based on lessons. We’re so used to having those lessons be handed to us on a silver platter by our parents or teachers that when those educators think it’s ok to let us go learn on our own, we don’t know how. We’ve been spoon fed so long that we don’t know what to do to extract lessons from life and then how to act upon those lessons.

You can begin by looking at your life, what has gone well and what hasn’t and then trying to figure out how you’d like to change to fix some of those things.

You’d be surprised at how well it will work …. If you just try it.