this started off as a school project for my final project in one of my classes. i still have a lot of growth to do on the virtue of gratefulness so i thought i would share my progress and what i have learned from this project.
Understanding the Virtue of Gratitude
gratitude is showing or feeling an appreciation for kindness or expressing thanks for what is.
its vice of excess is too grateful and its vice of deficiency is ungrateful. being too grateful in my opinion is not the worst vice to have.
an example of being too grateful is when you are out to dinner with a friend and you guys agree to split the bill, but you tell them you can pay for the bill. sometimes, you can force someone into an uncomfortable situation because they want to split the bill. instead of you being grateful and saying “thanks” you say “no, it’s okay, i got it” and the situation becomes awkward. being too grateful can get weird and uncomfortable. in addition, it is bad to force yourself into feeling grateful because that defeats the purpose.
we all know what ungratefulness looks like. someone sulking through their privileged life and complaining about the fact that they got a strawberry banana smoothie instead of cranberry raspberry smoothie for breakfast.
right now, i’m sure we are all experiencing some ungratefulness. maybe not in such a shallow way as mentioned above, but when you lose your freedom or something bad happens, it is easy to focus on the bad and think about how different and hard life is right now. right now, it is good to focus on gratefulness so we can see how lucky we are and how much we have.
How Can This Change My Life?
a few weeks ago when i was first starting this project, i found out one of my friend’s dad passed away from cancer. i was speechless and felt terrible because he was a great guy. then, my dad said something that stuck with me.
“count your blessings.”
we should be grateful because our immediate family is healthy right now and not fighting cancer or other illnesses. at first, that sounded like a very selfish thing for him to say. how can we count our blessings when another family was going through the worst time in their lives? AND THEN i realized this is a great opportunity to expand my universe of obligation.
your circle or universe of obligation is the group of people who you feel a responsibility to and the people who you feel the most need to care/look out for.
mine might look something like this:
i believe that when you feel grateful, you are more apt to widen your universe of obligation. if i feel grateful for the clothes that i have and i realize i don’t want as many anymore, i will be more willing to donate them to strangers. if i am grateful for the food put on my table, i am more willing to realize how other people may not have food and will want to volunteer at a food bank or give to the poor.
volunteering can do SO much good for you. it widens your eyes to your community and the world around you. you are helping yourself while also helping the community.
so… how can you start at feeling grateful?
at the end of every day, focus on one good thing that happened. it doesn’t have to be big, just remembering the smile you got from one of your neighbors or the hug you gave one of your family members can make a difference. this is better than focusing on the bad things that happened and having an overall bad day. end your day and go to sleep on a good note! your thoughts change your attitude and you can choose to have a positive end to your day.
finding one good thing, no matter how small, can greatly change your outlook on life in general. instead of: wow. there are so many other things i could have done today like hang out with my friends or go to the beach, but instead i was stuck at home. you can think: wow, i talked to my sister for thirty minutes straight today and i feel a little closer to her now than we were before. or: wow, i threw the ball for my dog to fetch for a whole hour today and my dog was the happiest he has been in a longgg time.
i have found that focusing on the virtue of gratefulness during quarantine has made me have a greater appreciation for life. if all of us teens start to focus on gratefulness, we will realize how much we have and how much we miss it. when we get out of quarantine and things start to go back to normal, i think a lot less teens will be on their phones.
we have been sitting at home on our electronics for so long, it is boring now. snapchat and instagram don’t mean as much as they used to before corona virus (in my opinion) and snapchat has become BORING. we will appreciate and be thankful for our friends and the wonders of mother nature because she is SOOO BEAUTIFUL! my dad loves to remind me that time spent on my phone is just my life wasting away. and you know what, he’s right.
so, to wrap up this quick post, gratitude can change your life. you just have to know where to start and how to let it.
i am closer on my way to attaining the virtue of gratitude and i hope you can join me on this journey.
that’s all for now! thanks for reading! hope you stick around and look at a few of my other posts!
xoxo,
sarah c
save with sarah c 