start monday with gratitude

There’s a beautiful celebration that takes place annually in the United States and amongst those who were born in that country but have, perhaps, since moved elsewhere in the world. And it’s called Thanksgiving.

On Thanksgiving, the 4th Thursday of November, families and/or close friends gather together for a feast, a celebration of food, of each other, of their lives. As they sit around the table, traditionally, each person takes it in turn to express what they are thankful for.

Thanksgiving is, for Americans, a hugely important event in their calendar.

However, can you imagine what it would be like to enjoy Thanksgiving every single day? To spend time with those you care about and love, giving thanks for all the blessings in your life?

Whilst it’s special to set aside a day to give thanks, we shouldn’t have only one day during which we express our thankfulness and gratitude. Expressing gratitude and thanks should be a daily ritual because when we express gratitude and thanks every day, we can turn those days into something great, something special, something to be grateful for. We elevate the everyday, the common days so they are on par with that one special day we set aside each and every year to give thanks: Thanksgiving.

When we approach the ordinary, the normal, the routine from a place of gratitude, we view them with a whole new and positive perspective. No longer do we take the everyday things, the routine jobs, the ordinary opportunities for granted. Because we view them with gratitude, we see them as special, and we fill them with joy and love.

When you approach household chores with gratitude and thankfulness for the comfort of your home, for the roof over your head, for the joy of being together with your family, then a household chore can become a household joy. By looking at it through grateful eyes, you lift the heaviness of a chore and turn it into something that brings a sense of pride into your home, a sense of joy for the blessings you enjoy.

When you see your job as something you need to do, somewhere you have to spend 8 unhappy and unfulfilling hours each day, you’ll be sure to waken up each Monday morning with the Monday Blues and you’ll be sure to struggle to get out of bed each and every morning. However, when you view your job through eyes of gratitude, gratefulness that you have a job, gratefulness that you earn money that puts food on your table, a roof over your head, and clothes on your back, then the weight of your morning routine and struggle to roll out of bed will dissipate. Through gratefulness, you’ll appreciate and be thankful for the opportunities that life can offer you simply because you go to work each day.

Gratefulness brings a lightness with it. When you show and express gratitude for a taxing task, for a joyless job, for challenging chore, you raise their heaviness to a higher vibration, to a vibration that is closer linked to joy and happiness than to gloom and misery.

By introducing gratitude to the ordinary, you transform it into the extraordinary.

How will you revamp your day today through gratitude? What tasks will you transform from the mundane to the marvellous?