Here we are at the beginning of another work week and another Quote of the Day. Being thankful is easy to say but to truly live it requires regular attention and commitment to choosing to be grateful. It is something I struggle with regularly. For me, the process of trying to make changes to my lifestyle make this even more difficult but also more necessary. Being grateful for the blessings I’ve been given, being content where I am at helps me approach change with proper perspective without getting caught up in how much further I have to go or get judgmental and self-incriminating about the time my journey is taking me. See, what I have to remind myself of regularly is that the process of change is about me. It is about being better today than I was yesterday. It is about doing more and going further than I could before. When I focus on being thankful I can help maintain that internal focus. When I start to lose sight of my blessings and the good things in my life it is usually because I have started to look externally. For me, making change then becomes the ultimate exercise in reflection because to do it properly, to maintain the effort when times are hard, to judge my efforts and results by my only real opponent, myself, requires I don’t look around me for a measuring stick but I am my own measuring stick. It becomes more difficult because it forces me to look at myself honestly, not with preconceived ideas of how the path should look or how long it should take. Those benchmarks come from a comparison to someone else. I have often heard that when we aren’t happy with what we have than nothing we have will ever be enough. I often confused the ideas of being content and grateful with someone who is not ambitious or driven. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Being content, to me, means that I am happy that I have done my very best and if my journey ends here that I was doing the best I could. It doesn’t mean that I want my journey to stop here. Far from it. But if I spend my whole journey waiting for the end to come so I can be happy and content how much of my life is wasted in that pursuit? I mean, the point of making changes is so that I can better enjoy my life. Then why would I want to put off the enjoyment of my efforts for some later date? It’s a weird thing. I thought I had to get to the end to be happy. That I couldn’t be content until I got there and it made the journey long and hard and grinding. When I started to take the joy and pleasure in where I currently stand, when I became grateful for how far I’ve come it became easier to make the better choices because it wasn’t a long hard road, it was becoming a process that I was enjoying along the way. Have a blessed day, y’all! Stay safe, stay dry and enjoy the beautiful day.
