Gratitude

“If the only prayer we ever say in our lives is “Thank You” that will be enough.”
– Meister Eckhart

A card with that saying on sits on my desk.
I see it every day.
And, truthfully, every day I try to say Thank you.
Sometimes it is a pretty perfunctory prayer for food enough and for the relationships which sustain my life. Other times my prayer comes from a deeper place. The events of the day or chance phone call or email touch something within me and pulls a deeper sense of gratitude to the surface of my life.

If the only prayer we ever say is Thank You…
While I try to say Thank You each day and regularly remind others to do the same, today I learned something new about gratitude.
I learned that gratitude is hard.
It requires effort.
It means stopping long enough to pay attention.
It means seeing who and what is around me.
It means pushing beyond the narrow confines of my shrink wrapped life.
It means making space and letting go and opening up all of which is risky.

And, I used to think it was so easy…..