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Gratitude: to have the wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again freshly and naively the basic goods of life with awe, pleasure, wonder and even ecstasy. —Abraham Maslow (paraphrased)
Gratitude is to see the familiar as unfamiliar. To see the world with a sense of newness. To freshly appreciate the most basic moments.
I tend to say “thank you” a lot. Which is of course a good habit, but unfortunately it sometimes doesn’t go deeper than just lip service. But sometimes I get that rare gift of experiencing gratitude. When my whole body stops and feels this sensation of wonder and appreciation.
What's interesting is that it can happen at the smallest, most nondescript moments.
Earlier this week I had a moment of gratitude doing what I do nearly everyday: walking around my neighborhood. I’ve seen this neighborhood hundreds of times at least. I had grown up here and lived here for nearly 20 years. It was so familiar that it was practically mundane.
But I made a small decision to walk a new route. And I stumbled across a beautiful oak tree. Actually, it was about 6 different oak trees in a circle with a sloped little depression of grass in the center. The trees were so tall and regal, they made a gorgeous canopy above me with their large branches. It was majestic.
At that moment I felt a rare moment of awe and wonder. In one sense, there’s nothing new or different here –there are oak trees all over north Florida! But what was new and different was the fact that I was present enough to notice these trees and appreciate them. Imagine what it would be like to access this space more often. To live in a way that we can easily appreciate the most basic things and see them with fresh, new eyes.
Isn’t that a worthy goal to aspire for? To see the world with a sense of newness, possibility, and wonder.
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