Be Thankful!

With Thanksgiving holiday around the corner, it is always my favorite time to reflect, appreciate all blessings in life, and giving thanks to all the ups and downs occurring throughout the year that brought us to where we are today… only more than one month till the end of 2018.  What do you have in store to be thankful for?

Being thankful for our health! The fact that the chance to have each of us being born by our parents is one of 400 trillion is pretty amazing, if not a miracle. As a human being, each of us has received such a unique blessing to exist on this earth, but how many of us had a chance to appreciate the fact that each of us is truly a miracle? a miracle of life!  If we wake up today and we are healthy, we can walk, run, play and can move around physically, it is already a tremendous blessing to be thankful for. Our physical health is something that most of us takes for granted until we are struck by some disease or illness. Thanksgiving holiday is a perfect opportunity to be grateful for our physical health as well as our mental and emotional health. Actually practicing gratitude has proven to be one of the best strategies to improve one’s happiness and emotional wellness.

Being thankful for our home and family! If we have a home to stay during this holiday season, it is truly a blessing that we need to be grateful for. If we have a place called home to go back, to be part of during the holiday, we are luckier than 550,000 people who are homeless in America today and 150 million people worldwide who do not have a home for themselves. If we have our own family with our spouse and our children, we are luckier than more than 21 million people who are either single mom or single dad in America these days. Simple thing like having a home to stay and a family to come back to celebrate Thanksgiving holiday are truly the blessings that sometimes we just take for granted. Abundance does not lie into the money in our bank, it lies in simple facts like these, when we realize how blessed we are in this world.

Being thankful for the relationships in your life, especially our friends and loved ones. How often we acknowledge the importance of our loved ones and our friends who are always there when we need them? Sometimes, we do not realize how much blessed we were to have our friends, our family with us, until we lose some of them. During this Thanksgiving season, please take time to reflect and appreciate each and everyone in your family and your circle of close friends. These are the people who will support you throughout your life, especially when things are challenging. They will be there for you and help you to pull through.

Being thankful for the food, the sunshine, the flowers, the birds singing, and all life blessings around us that sometimes we fail to notice. If we have food in our refrigerator, we are already luckier than 75% of the world around us. When we start paying attention to all the little details of the beautiful nature around us, we will find tremendous blessings and abundance everywhere we go. Practicing this kind of awareness and appreciation will make our life much more enriched and meaningful. Practicing gratitude brings us happiness, joy and fulfillment as we go through  life, and that is the best gift we can give ourselves in this holiday season.

I would encourage each of us take time to reflect, appreciate, acknowledge and reaching out to others who are less fortunate than us to give and to serve. Let us spread the blessings and the positive energy that we have to others as we practice gratitude. Our life will be much more lively and joyful if we practice gratitude not only through the Thanksgiving holiday but also throughout the year, in our daily life.  Just imagine how much light and sunshine one can spread to others if one’s heart is full of love and gratitude. The opportunities are endless.