What has thankfulness taught you?

Every experience can teach us something. Too often we don't take the time to unpack the the insights and lessons. The world is moving fast and will not make introspection easy.

When an accident happens on the job, managers pull the team together to conduct an investigation to understand the process breakdowns that led to the issue. The organization reviews processes, and updates procedures to ensure avoiding a repeat accident in the future.

What investigations do you work through for the good things in your life? Reviewing our lives and redoubling our efforts is a common practice at the beginning of the year, birthdays, or other milestones. Understanding what is working and why it is working can be a powerful tool to enhance effectiveness and duplicate these successes to other areas of life.

What are the findings of the thankfulness investigation in your life?

Did you learn who you legitimately care for and others not as deeply as you thought?
How you define gratitude?
Who has invested in your life?
Imagined what could have happened and didn't?
Determine if you are an optimist or a pessimist?

If we don't learn the lesson, the first time we will often get more opportunities to learn the same lesson again. I have plenty of unpleasant experiences that I didn't learn the first time, and repeating the curriculum is bitter.

Let's make the most of the educational opportunity that life delivers. Choose to repeat the life-giving experiences and move on from the negative.

What's hard to be thankful for?

It is easy to be thankful when the belly is full, and family laughter fills the warm home. How do you express thankfulness for the struggles and dark times that delivered you to today?

We celebrate our differences; skin tone, hometown, dialect, tattoos, and talents. Only Ken and Barbie are "perfect," and a figment of the toymaker's imagination. Conversations reveal our imperfect stories that are far more complicated than merely being taken out of a box and put on a shelf to be admired.

The beauty of the smile is the character that has overcome the scars of life. The unfulfilled dreams, broken promises, wrongs committed and wrongs suffered are part of the human experience. All are engaged in their own battle, and some have encountered the depths of hell on earth.

But,

This is not where the story ends.

Our path is unique. No one brings the same set of talents with the same assortment of experiences. We must embrace both our brokenness and successes as part of our story.

In this embrace, we encounter the mystery of thankfulness in the abyss of difficult times. It is here that straightness is found in crookedness, beauty in ugliness, and light in the darkness. Often only through the lens of time can the goodness be found.

The wisdom of the ancients fills history books recounting that perseverance can only be attained through pain and suffering. The athlete trains through difficult circumstances to harden her body to prepare for the rigors of competition.

How have you converted what was meant for evil into goodness?

More hard times are on the way and will require your perseverance and strength. Turning to face your history and finding a reason for thankfulness will embolden you as the sun rises on tomorrow. Tomorrow is expecting a stronger you to climb out of the ashes.

Going Further: What challenges are you now thankful you encountered? How does this inform your perspective on difficulty? How have these experiences helped you relate to others? How does your brokenness influence your thankfulness?

How are you thankful for the mundane?

By definition, the mundane is, well, ordinary and non-spectacular.

Meeting the President, securing a round of seed funding, watching your child take her first steps or receiving a diploma live up to the title of milestones or "once in a lifetime" events.

Even though I have Facebook and Instagram accounts with pretty pictures, I don't live the life of the rich and famous. The mundane is where we spend the majority of our time. No matter how much time we spend posing for a picture or capturing our lunch in a photograph, the ordinary is waiting for our return.

Our modern world rejects the common or at least tries to make it glamorous. My spell checker is flagging the use of "common" in the last sentence because it is overused and recommending other words that reflect an expansive vocabulary.

This is equivalent to waiting for the afternoon sunlight to touch the cheese and Wonderbread sandwich just right, before taking a picture to post on social media. 800,000 photos in an archive and nothing comes up when I search for "mundane," it ain't sexy.

We must capitalize on the massive block of time that comprises the minutes between birth and death. Thankfulness can transform the moments waiting to be picked up from school, cleaning the bathroom, cooking another dinner, or waiting in traffic (grrrrr).

Being caught in traffic on my way to the office means I have a job. Picking up blocks for the umpteenth time reminds me of the children in the next room. Arguing with dad about politics reveals that he is still alive. Paying the insurance bill indicates that I will get care to address a catastrophic diagnosis.

The thankfulness list is endless when given the time to adjust our perspective. When the first list is exhausted, comparing our lives to those who live in impoverished or war-torn nations or our list is exponential.

Let's rethink and recognize the blessings of the mundane. These moments are added up to equal a lifetime, and for that, we can be thankful.

Going Futher: How have you taken the mundane things in your life for granted? How can you embrace the mundane? How would this change impact your daily outlook?

Photo credit: My dishwasher rejects the label of mundane. It is working a rebranding strategy and available for photo shoots as a sexy dishwasher. DM for details.

Spell checker disclaimer: I love my spell checker, it continues to help me produce a better product for your consumption. As a result, we are all thankful to Grammarly.com. Thanks, guys!

How do you express thankfulness?

All action movies end in the same way. The heroine is smudged with black soot in just the right places, clothing is shredded enough to show sexy abs, and the high heels are long gone. The hero emerges from the wreckage with either alien blood or the villain's blood mingled with his own and arrives at his lover's side in time to see the sun setting on a world unforeseen.

The characters overflow with gratitude to be alive and relieved Earth's destruction is averted for another day. These two emotions, gratitude, and relief comprise thankfulness. The hero's journey provides the perfect outline for you and me to identify where we most encounter thankfulness.

The heroine gives the hero a kiss (gratitude) for saving her life (relief). The hero shakes the police chief's hand (gratitude) for the backup at the critical moment to avert his untimely death (relief).

How do you express thankfulness?

This is tricky since we have to provide the second component, relief. Most often, I only deliver on the gratitude. If I want to express thankfulness to my wife for dinner, I need to nail both elements.

Thankfulness would look something like, "Thank-you for dinner, the flavors worked well together, and without it, I would have made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or gone to bed hungry. In either case, my growling stomach would have kept us both up and woken the boogie man under the bed." (Refer to the hero's journey above)

Thankfulness becomes a much richer experience for both parties when fully expressed. This exchange becomes a chance to talk about the impact of what could have happened if the intervention did not occur.

The expression of thankfulness around the Thanksgiving table becomes more intimate as family and friends share the often overlooked 'relief' component, for others to appreciate.

The good news is that this expression is not limited to one day out of the year. Every day we will encounter those that deserve our thankfulness all it takes is paying attention to the acts of kindness that occur each day.

Going Further: Do you include both components when expressing thankfulness? What response do you receive when expressing thankfulness? How do you feel and what do you think when someone thanking you cites specific actions and how it has impacted their life? How can you improve your thankfulness game?