Sanctimonious Steve

Sanctimonious:  Making a show of being morally superior to other people.

Gratitude:  The quality of being thankful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness.

A good topic for the meeting this morning: Gratitude.  Makes me reflect, once again, at how angry a lot of people are.  I was at the grocery store yesterday where literally every person was wearing a mask except for one woman and she looked pissed.  She looked confrontational.  I don't like to wear a mask, either, but frankly I don't want to put myself in a position where I'm setting myself up for conflict.  There are enough wars going on in my head as it is without trying to provoke one with someone I don't know.

Gratitude turns what we have into enough.

It's not enough to be aware of all of the blessings and gifts in my life - I have to be actively grateful for them if I want to be happy.  I can't just tonelessly tick them off of a list yadda yadda yadda blah blah blah.  I need to think about them deeply, to ponder them, to continuously modify the list, to tweak it every day.

I used to have to force myself to be grateful.  It took an act of will to turn my attention away from my difficulties, trivial though they may be, and focus it instead on my blessings.  Today this is a habit that occurs naturally much of the time.  My head goes to the blessing automatically.  I can almost hear machinery clicking and whirring, like a bad record being removed and a good one being deposited in a vintage jukebox.

“Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.” – Buddha

I like the reductionist quality to that quote from the Buddha: At least I didn't die.  That is elemental, my friend.