a hitchhhiker's guide to gratitude

I don't know much about Emily as I only just met her and our meeting lasted all of about 10 minutes. However, you don't need to always meet someone or know someone for a long time for them to impact your life.

We picked Emily up as we drove near the airport. She was hitchhiking. My husband and I tend to pick up hitch-hikers quite often. She seemed young, on her own, and with a rucksack that was the same size and weight as her. So we stopped.

Emily is on a gap year - a year of discovery before she moves onto college. She's from Ontario in Canada. And so far, in the first 6 months of her gap year, she has traveled through (from memory but not in this order) Germany (where her grandmother lives), Bosnia Herzegovina, Croatia, Greece, Morocco, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Slovenia... she had traveled up to Salzburg from Slovenia that day. And she was doing this all on her own at the tender age of about 19 years.

Her personality was beautiful. She was bubbly and full of life. Very easy to chat to and easy to connect with. It didn't surprise me that she had managed to travel through so many countries already.

Emily reminded me of a couple of lovely guys we picked up a few weeks ago.

They had gone to work in Berlin however had been let down by the job and were trying to hitchhike their way home to Bosnia Herzegovina.

When we picked them up on the outskirts of Salzburg, they'd been hitchhiking for 6 days already from Berlin. We didn't dare think how long it would take them to reach their homeland.

And yet, in comparison, here was this 19 year old, hitchhiking with ease, chewing up one European country after the other.

It got me thinking.

Emily wasn't nicer, she wasn't smarter, she wasn't kinder than the two lads we had picked up. Okay, she was prettier... However, the primary difference I noticed was in attitude. Where Emily was on an adventure and loving every second of it, the two lads had had a negative experience in Berlin and couldn't let that go. As a result, whether drivers realised it or not, they were more reluctant to stop and help them on their journey.

And that got me thinking about gratitude and energy.

We are all energy and we are all vibrating. And, as the Law of Attraction states, we attract to us things that vibrate at a similar level.

Emily was vibrating at a high vibration. She was loving her adventure and grateful for every second of every day. As a result she was picking up rides without much difficulty.

The two lads, on the other hand, had been badly let down and were carrying that heavy vibration with them and, as a result, were struggling to make it home.

When we practice gratitude, when we live a life filled with gratitude, we vibrate at a higher frequency. And, as a result, we attract to us things to be grateful for. It's a bit like a positive catch-22 situation - you're grateful and BOOM! you attract something else to be grateful for, you're grateful for that and Boom! you attract even more to be grateful for.

Viv xx