Gratitude and Happiness

It’s that thanksgiving/giving thanks time of year and lots of us are gearing up for a weekend with family, or perhaps for a holiday touched by loss, sadness, or other difficult emotions to hold when it seems like the rest of the world is celebrating. I was happy to be reminded of the practice of gratitude this week and its proven connection with happiness and improved mental health.  You can read the whole article here: Choose to Be Grateful.  I particularly  liked the suggestion to practice “interior gratitude”:  giving thanks privately, like silently thanking the people who surround you at work or the person who gives up their seat on the subway to someone else.  But what touched my heart was the challenge to be grateful for “useless things.”  Here’s a quote, including a fabulous bit of poetry:

Finally, be grateful for useless things. It is relatively easy to be thankful for the most important and obvious parts of life — a happy marriage, healthy kids or living in America. But truly happy people find ways to give thanks for the little, insignificant trifles. Ponder the impractical joy in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “Pied Beauty”:

Glory be to God for dappled things —

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced — fold, fallow, and plough;

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

What are you grateful for today?  Glory be for early darkness in cozy heat, people moving around in lighted windows in their offices in the building across the street, a colleague’s hello, the subway running smoothly.  Dappled things.