While gratitude is our theme of the week, we really hope it is the theme of your life, because, as we note below, it’s a life-enhancer. Please consider purchasing my book, Creating Delight – Connecting Gratitude, Humor, and Play for all ages, with many ideas for tangibly showing your gratitude. We welcome your feedback (Kathy@WiserNow.com) to this mailing, and you will have our enormous gratitude if you share this email with your mail list or if you aren't already a subscriber you can sign up for it yourself here.

The Quote

Gratitude is a sort of Laughter of the heart.
~ Author/columnist David Brooks
 

The Quirky Observation

Well, maybe it’s the observation expressed as a cartoon that’s quirky. I received permission to reproduce three of Randy Glasbergen’s cartoons, including this one, in my Creating Delight book. I had long been fascinated by the delightful mind of Mr. Glasbergen who could create seemingly endless funny lines between two fish in a bowl. And don’t get me started on his penguins, snails, centipedes, hens, dogs, cats, and other creatures – plus humans, of course. I urge you to check out the possibilities for adding laughter to your day at www.Glasbergen.com and to purchase his book Glasbergen Cartoons. You’ll laugh long beyond Thanksgiving.

The Quirky Fact

As I note in my book, gratitude can:

• Foster greater happiness, a more hopeful outlook, more positive emotions and fewer negative feelings such as anger, envy, depression, loneliness, and anxiety
• Help us savor life, live in the present
• Strengthen relationships by building social bonds as we become more helpful, empathetic to others
• Increase energy
• Reduce stress
• Boost our immune system, lower blood pressure and reduce inflammation
• Facilitate communication, interrupt aggression
• Create a positive atmosphere in which to work/live

And the quirkiness of this is that while matching feelings of gratitude to grateful actions is ideal, you can gain some level of these benefits simply by thinking about what you are grateful for.