It’s great that there is a designated time during the year to show gratitude for all the blessings in life. Families converge, cook tons of food, share stories and go around the room and share what they are thankful for. It’s a reminder to get us out of our complaints and thoughts about where we want to be. Thanksgiving helps us remove the tunnel vision of what we want and brings focus to the things that we already have, the many blessings that we often forget about. We also tend to overlook taking a deeper look at some of the negative things that happened so that we can attempt to extract positivity from those negative moments. As we write this article, we discussed how thankful we are to be able to contribute to American CurrentSee. Let’s takes a moment and remember that the small things and even the bad things are not to be ignored in our list of things to be thankful for.
Thankfulness for the small things
I step outside of my car and start walking towards the double doors of the Liberty University gym. I see a guy converging towards the double doors with me, and I’m trying to gauge whether he will make it there first or if I will. He beats me to the door and I can tell he’s going to hold the door for me because he glances at me before opening it. He opens the door, turns to me and nods down with a slight grin. I look at him and say, “Thanks, man.” I step inside and immediately think to myself, “You know you didn’t have to hold the door for me, right?” But he did and I was thankful for that minor assist from a stranger.
I find myself thinking often about the regular occurrences in life and how appreciative I am to experience them. For example, every time I go to a water fountain in public, the device works without fail, even if the stream is weak. Every time I turn the ignition in my car, the vehicle starts. Each night I fall asleep, my heart continues to beat and my lungs pump air through my body for the entire night. While those are average occurrences in life, the impact that they have on our lives is blatant the moment they stop working.
The moment when we take the regular things for granted is when we start to lose touch with the simplicity of life, the magnificence of being alive on this planet. Making a regular habit of thanking God, your parents and your friends for being there for you is necessary for building them up and yourself. Like anything else, showing gratitude takes practice in order to turn it into a habit. Here are three tips you can do to keep thankfulness in mind often.
Keep a thankfulness log: Writing down things that you are thankful for helps you to remember all the blessings that happened to you, no matter how small. You can even go back and review the things that you were thankful for last month and maybe rekindle that thankfulness.
Show gratitude to others often: Doing this builds up the receiver of the thankfulness, but it also puts you in the “thinking of others” mode which makes you feel awesome. The person who receives the thanks will know that you care about them and appreciate the things that they do for you. People are more willing to continue to help you if you say thanks or send a gift
Try to see the positive in situations that aren’t exactly positive: This one can be difficult, but like I mentioned before, it takes practice to be proficient at it. Complaining does not fix how you feel about the situation for the better. You’re better off trying to see the positive in that situation. Rather than complain, think of solutions to remedy that complaint. What can you do to fix it? What can be done better next time?
Keeping thanks on the tip of your tongue makes life flow by more smoothly because your outlook is more positive. Thankfulness builds up others and can be contagious.
Extracting positivity from negativity
In life, a series of things happen that make you who you are; from the first friends that you make, to the first time that your parents trust you to go into the city by yourself. There are lots of good things that occur, but life also comes with negative things. I believe that everything we go through as humans can either make us weaker or stronger.
Personally, I dealt with this longing to be someone else. I dealt with bullying and eventually I believed what people were saying about me. I thought that life was not worth living. I was in a pit of despair. For a long time I played the victim, but there was a moment in my life that I knew I could no longer do that if I wanted to achieve anything of great value. Most of my value was in what I owned and not who I was and that’s a dangerous place to be.
A good first step to getting over what I like to call the low point is to surround yourself with people that believe in you. These are people that will invest in you with their time and add value in your life and they will not allow you to stay at the low point. Another thing that can be done is looking internally and find the good things about you. Start negating the lies with the truth. Constantly tell yourself out loud why you are good enough, and the more you hear the truth, the more you will believe it.
Looking back on everything that I went through and even my current challenges, I can say that I am thankful for these experiences. When I say I am thankful, I am not saying that if I could change them I would not, because I certainly would. I am simply stating that since you cannot change the past, you’re better off learning lessons from the negative so that you can insure that your future self is the best you possible. Negative moments are opportunities for us to turn to our Faith for our strength, opportunities to grow a backbone, and help others who may be experiencing the same difficulties.
• Christian Givens is a Liberty University alumni and now works as a field team assistant for Carson America Inc. He is also a young entrepreneur. He can be followed on Twitter @chrisaaron7. William Smith is a Liberty University alumni and currently works as a videographer for Liberty University’s Online Communities Department. William is also an entrepreneur.
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