The Power Of Gratitude

Grateful and alive


Here are the pitfalls
To starting over when you’re older
Or not so much the pitfalls
But things that make it difficult

The past
Becomes a problem
Whether it’s regrets
Ways you squandered your youth
The woulda shoulda couldas
Ganging up to mug you in a parking lot
Or even
All the good times now gone
The people and situations which are no more
And if you’ve moved
From fabulous places
Those cities
Those beaches
They’ve gone on living without you
And there is a factory full of ghosts in your mind now
That the years have invited to the party of your soul

And they’re throwing a banger
The past tends to put rose colored glasses
All over every crack in the highway
That got you to where you are now
In the here and the now
And that’s fine
And outside of writing a memoir
Reflecting on the past is good here and there
But what we really want is to be on the razors edge of our personal evolution
We want to be at the main event now
Now living in the now
Cause perceiving the main event was then
We just have to know that in the future
The now we are in now will be looking like the main event then again
And so the cycle goes

Be here now
Ram das wrote in his book of playful enlightenment
Be here now

It’s a tall order
The past calling you to its highlight reel
And the future
Warning you of dangers to come
Or potential disasters
Our minds are wired to survive
And so naturally will aim at the potential pitfalls
The negatives so to speak
It’s called survival baby

And being grateful is the key to it all
The key to arriving in the present that is.
Gratitude is an invitation into the ecstasy of the moment
And life is full of that as well
Ecstasy I mean.
Beyond the layers of intrigue taking you out of the moment
We live in the midst of consciousness expanding
We live in the midst of creation happening now!
I mean right now!
To actually witness it
To explore it
To notice it
To celebrate it
To pray for it
To be grateful for it
For this breath
And for this one too
And here comes another and another right behind.
But eventually there will be no more
And none of us know when that eventually will be.

The value each breath holds is endless
When framed that way
And yet so many are wasted
In the pitfalls of worry breaking your connection
To the here and the now

Think of the heaviness of your last ten breaths
Contemplating death is something the stoics believed in
To remind yourself of the actual intensity of the moment we are in
Right now.
The intense beauty of it
The opportunity it gives us to create
To expand
To breath into it
And give something back to it
We are like tiny Gods in our ability to create
We are reflections of the entire universe expanding
Through words taking us in various directions
First there was the word
Through words we expand our horizons
When we attach our words to the truth
We attach them to spaceships
And take off in surprising directions

We land on the razors edge of our personal evolution
And transcend our reptilian natures

The amygdala is commonly thought to form the core of a neural system for processing fearful and threatening stimuli (4), including detection of threat and activation of appropriate fear-related behaviors in response to threatening or dangerous stimuli.

That part of our brain is activated almost constantly these days
Putting us in perpetual states of fight or flight

The survivor that keeps us in concern
Or reflection

But if we can lean on faith
And bypass those hard wired animalistic functions within us that tend to rob us of the magic of the moment

we can land in the laughter of the here and now
Of inspiration
We arrive at the moment
This moment
This magical infinity
The one all other infinities were striving to reach

To be grateful
Is to transcend fear
To transcend anger
And the various betrayals

To have faith that you are looked after
And to acknowledge the creator

Because we are grateful
When we are given a gift

A gift such as life has been given to us from a source
Only you determine what you believe that source to be
But the answer that provokes the most awe inspiring sense of gratitude
Is what alarms me to the nature of the truth

Each breath is like a gift
Each moment a chance to call out and become

And there’s something about the fleeting nature of it all
That helps spell it out for us

Life is difficult yes
But it’s much more than that

It’s an evolution of dreams becoming real
With lapsing days
Saying goodbye more rapidly than the day before

And
If we forget to be grateful
We miss the best part.