Thanksgiving is a time of Gratitude; To ask ourselves, What are we grateful for?
There is so much good evidence that Gratitude keeps us focused on the right things, the healthy things in our lives. Research shows that those who engage in daily gratitude exercises, experience higher levels of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, optimism, and energy.
If you haven’t sat down and absorbed what gratitude can do for you, here are 2 articles that teach us well the benefits of Gratitude:
The Science Behind Gratitude (and How It Can Change Your Life) by Derrick Carpenter.
http://my.happify.com/hd/the-science-behind-gratitude/
How Gratitude Can Change Your Life by Marelisa Fabrega
Gratitude is so important to nurses, that a nurse friend of mine, Jae, wrote a book about it.
Available on Amazon
To go further on the same path ….
here is a question that comes from Mark Nepo, author, poet, and philosopher
that delights me and challenges my thoughts and thinking to no end…
What surprised you during this last year?
Here is Nepo’s introduction to Seven Thousand Ways to Listen;
this response encompasses all that is Nursing.
“At a gathering in SF, I met Marco, a patient and careful photographer from Santa Clara. When asked what surprised him during this last year, his voice began to quiver. He’d witnessed two breaths that had changed his life. His daughter’s first breath. Then his mother’s last breath. As his daughter inhaled the world, it seemed to awaken her soul on Earth. As his mother exhaled her years, it seemed to free her soul of the world. These two breaths jarred Marco to live more openly and honestly. He took these two breaths into his own daily breathing and quickly saw their common presence in everyone’s breathing. Is it possible that, with each inhalation, we take in the world and awaken our soul? And with each exhalation, do we free ourselves of the world, which inevitably entangles us? Is this how we fill up and empty a hundred times a day, always seeking the gift of the two breaths? Perhaps this is the work of being.” Nepo, 2012, p.3.
What surprised you during this last year?
Nepo M. Seven Thousand Ways To Listen; Staying Close to What is Sacred. New York: Atria Paperback; 2012.