Daily Ramblings – Motivation Monday – Counting Our Blessings

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Blessings, Eric Hoffer, Grateful, Gratitude, Monday, Mood, motivation, Simple Things

The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.

Eric Hoffer

I have touched on this topic before, but thought it was appropriate to attend to it again. The topic: Gratitude Journaling. We all know that much of our motivation is tied to our attitudes and moods. What better way to cheer ourselves up than to write down all the things we are grateful for. The really important ones are those things we take for granted.

Expressing gratitude for a warm bed, a roof over your head, plenty of food, and good health are good ones to start with. Another thing to think about are the people in your life and how they bring you joy. When was the last time you wrote down how grateful you were for your significant other? It’s so easy to get mired in the day-to-day doldrums and monotonous schedules we gravitate to just to make a living.

Starting a gratitude journal is pretty easy. You write down a date and write down 2 or 3 things you are grateful for. Try to think of different things each day. If you have to repeat, no problem. The key is to just spend a few moments thinking about how good life really is, when you think about it.

Have a great Monday, folks!

Until next time…

Dave

Daily Ramblings – Thankful Thursday – Life is a Celebration

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Blessings, God, Grateful, Happy Halloween, Harold Klemp, Life, Thankful

“So few know what a love for living means. They’ve put a web around themselves and called it spiritual. Life is a celebration. Some will read that as wanton living, but true celebration is loving God and Its own.” – Harold Klemp – The Language of Soul

This quote struck me today as appropriate for today, because we are celebrating another Halloween. If you do not celebrate today, cool. We celebrate by passing out goodies to the kids that come around to the house. I enjoy watching scary movies and we enjoy the many costumed kids that come to the door.

Halloween marks the beginning of the holiday season for me. When Halloween hits, there’s Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day and then we’re off to a new adventure. It’s also nice because my wife’s birthday and our wedding anniversary is in December too.

I love life. I really do. I enjoy what I do every day; I feel great physically and mentally, and it is a true gift to spend time with my folks in their senior years. Yeah, as a family we have our days, but for the most part, it’s great fun. My Dad likes telling stories about his childhood and my Mom does too. We eat most of our meals as a family and we are all readers, spending most of the “bad weather” days inside combing through our books.

My love of life is spurred by my gratitude. I try to find gratitude for all I do and receive. I am grateful for my family, friends, colleagues, siblings, and God. It is a wonderful feeling to wake up every day knowing that God loves me and every moment I am here is a blessing God has given me to gain experience and learn how to love and serve others. This is simplicity itself.

Happy Halloween! (for those that celebrate)

Have a great Thursday, the last day of October, and get ready to attack November.

Until next time…

Dave

 

Daily Ramblings – Thankful Thursday – Gifts

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Blessings, Gifts, God, Grateful, Gratitude, Life, Reverence, Unique

Your talent is God’s gift to you. What you do with it is your gift back to God. – Leo Buscaglia

We all have talents. We are all good at something. Today, I am grateful for the natural gifts I have been blessed with.

One of my greatest gifts is my affinity for learning. I have always enjoyed school and learning new things. Now that I am done with formal schooling, the freedom to learn new things is important. I enjoy learning about everything. Obviously, I am focused on learning more about computer programming, writing, and continuous self-improvement, but I am always interested in finding courses on topics ranging from history to philosophy. I consider this ability to learn and my curiosity to be great gifts.

What gifts do you have? What God-given gifts do you have that you are grateful for?

If you are unaware of them, take a moment and do a personal inventory. What do you do for a living? What hobbies do you have? What do you enjoy doing? Your gift is in there somewhere. Maybe you have an affinity for exploring and adventure? Maybe you enjoy the gift of great motor skills and video games are your forte? Maybe you like a good story and you love to read and watch movies and television shows. Maybe you are a great organizer and a master at raising your kids. Or maybe your gift is an endless well of patience and love that you give to everyone around you.

You see, the gifts you receive are going to be unique to you and your life circumstances. They may not be as concrete as mine, but you will have them. You just have to look at what you do, where you are, and what you naturally gravitated towards. These gifts are priceless. They are what make us unique. They allow us to participate in life, adding to the quilt of our reality, where each of us plays a part.

Take some time to think about this today. You may have never thought about it before. I think you’ll be amazed at the gifts you have been given and how you use them in your everyday life. Still having difficulty? Check out this article: Self-Worth: 5 Ways to Identify Your Unique Gifts, provided by Tris Thorp from the Chopra Center. I think you’ll be surprised and you will get a huge A-ha when you begin thinking about this.

Once you know what your strengths are, take some time to see if there is anything you could do with this gift that you are not currently doing. This may provide you some direction that is lacking in your life, or you may just get a confirmation that you are doing exactly what you should be doing.

There are so many things to be grateful for in this life. Life is precious and a gift. Take full advantage of what you have. I wish all of you a terrific Thursday!

Until next time…

Dave

Daily Ramblings – Spiritual Saturday – Attitude Adjustment

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Attitude, Blessings, Ego, God, Gratitude, Little Self, Mind

If we want to keep the blessings of life coming to us, we must learn to be grateful for whatever is given.

—Harold Klemp

The Language of Soul

Gratitude is an interesting character trait. It requires us at times to really dig deep to find something, something to be grateful for. As the quote says, we must LEARN to be grateful for whatever is given.

So, how do you learn to be grateful? I think this is an individual endeavor. What works for me may not work for you. I started out with the 5-minute journal and followed the instructions that it provides at the beginning of it when you pull it out of the package that arrives. “List three things you are grateful for” in the morning. “List three things you are grateful for” in the evening before bed. This simple, short exercise helped me finally grasp what it means to be grateful.

When I first started I listed out the common things everyone is grateful for. I was grateful for my wife. I was grateful for my stepdaughters. I was grateful for my immediate family. After a while, when I began to see the benefits of explicitly writing down what I was grateful for, I began to get more detailed. Instead of “I am grateful for my wife” I would write down “I am grateful for my wife because she works so hard to take care of me and our girls.” When I began writing the specifics of why I was grateful for something, the feeling I had changed to a stronger feeling.

There’s another quote I began to think about during this time period. The quote reads, “Things are done for us, not to us.” I don’t know who the author of this quote is, but it had an impact on me. Think about that for a moment. Things are done for you, not to you. Think of the last time you had that “woe is me” feeling. Now think about this quote. It is hard to capture gratitude when things are crumbling around you, but if you truly embrace, “things are done for you, not to you”, you begin to see that God is doing everything for you so you can become a more spiritual being.

Maybe God is trying to tell you to change your diet, or it’s time to get a new job, or it’s time to move to a new area. If you believe that God is doing things for you and not to you, some events in your life that are traumatic or unsettling, take on a whole new light.

These attitudinal changes make a huge difference in how you approach your day. Think how good you will feel when you discover that nothing can rattle you, that your internal happiness cannot be affected by the changes in weather, what other people do or don’t do, or how things turn out for you. The human mind is so feeble and incapable of grasping the whole that we rarely see how God works in our lives, nor in the lives of others. It is beyond the human mind’s capability to see the infinite amount of variables that intertwine to make our reality.

Gratitude is a simple character trait. It is being grateful for your life. It is being grateful for what you have. It is being purposefully grateful for the blessings that God has given you. The ego and the human mind are very small vessels. They are necessary for our survival, but easily offended, upset, and dumbfounded. This is where a faith-belief must take hold in your heart. If God is perfect, which IT is, everything in this universe must be in its rightful place—everything. Everything that God does for us must be received as a blessing not a curse.

When you begin shifting your attention from what you don’t have to what you do have your life will take on a whole new meaning. Try this out. Use a pad of paper, a journal, or a computer program (I use MS OneNote) to do my gratitude journaling. It has made a huge impact on my life and it will do the same for you.

If any of you try this, keep me posted on any changes you feel or what impact this change in attitude brings into your life. Feel free to leave your revelations or insights in the comments below.

As always, have a great Saturday!

Until next time…

Dave

Daily Ramblings – Thankful Thursday – Thank You Followers!

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Blessings, Blogging, Content, Grateful, Gratitude, New Followers, Ramblings, Thank you

Today’s edition thanks you, my followers. I really appreciate all of you who follow Daily Ramblings and hope to continue to provide great content in the years to come. Like all blogs, evolution is continual. We find a topic we enjoy writing about and our followers result because of the content we are discussing.

I really appreciate the comments you provide. I also appreciate you spending time reading my postings. I try to keep these postings brief out of respect for your time, but will hit pockets that spur me to write much longer postings.

Blogging has been freeing. It allows me to write daily and contribute to this forum. It also allows me to record my thoughts and feelings daily, which fluctuate over the days and months that precede a posting. Sometimes my posts are impacted by the news, a holiday, or an event in my life that is meaningful. At other times, I just write and the topic develops itself.

I hope all of you are having a terrific week! We are enjoying some rain today. It is really relaxing to look at the rain from my office chair and relish that I’m inside, warm and cozy. In my Army days, you couldn’t escape the weather. It always seemed like whenever we went to the field, the weather turned sour. In reality, the weather didn’t change at all. You don’t notice the weather until you are in it and have no means of escaping it.

Yesterday, I fired up my grill for the first time this year. I enjoy a good steak fresh off the grill. Today, I’ll be pan frying my food, as the rain won’t allow me to grill today. For those of you who have the opportunity to grill today, enjoy! The food tastes so good on the grill.

Well, that’s it for today, folks! Have a great Thursday!

Until next time…

Dave

Daily Ramblings – Workout Diary – Happy Thanksgiving

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Blessings, family, Friends, Grateful, pets, Thanksgiving

In light of Thanksgiving this week, I’ll be taking the rest of this week off to rest and recuperate. I’ve been hitting it hard in the gym for the bulk of this year and need a break. My brother is flying in tomorrow and we are heading to my Sister’s for Thanksgiving Day. I know I’m going to eat some things I normally wouldn’t and I know I won’t have much time in and around all of the planned festivities this week, so I’ll begin posting again next Monday.

For those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving, Happy Thanksgiving!

In light of this holiday, I wanted to express my thanks to all of you who have followed this blog and for all of the readers out there that will discover my work at some point. It is a really great thing to have readers scattered across the globe.

I am grateful for my readers, I am grateful for my health, grateful for my family and friends, grateful for my pets, grateful for the opportunity to have this life to lead, and grateful for the blessings that God gives me every day. I am also grateful to those who have taught me, mentored me, and contributed in some way to my life.

I wish each of you a great time with loved ones, good food, and hope you take some time to reflect on all of the blessings in your life. It is really a blessing to live life and experience all of the things that are out there for all of us.

See you next week!

Dave

Daily Ramblings – Daily Quote

Tags

Blessings, Grateful, Gratitude, Quote

“If we want to keep the blessings of life coming to us, we must learn to be grateful for whatever is given.” – Harold Klemp – The Language of Soul

Well, I can’t say enough about gratitude. Gratitude is more than being grateful, it is about the realization of every miracle that occurs in our daily lives. It is accepting what is and being happy with what we have–where we are–what we are doing. It is about who we have in our lives and how they contribute to our experience.

If you cannot be thankful for what you have you will never be. It is that simple. Happiness is not about what you have, who you have, where you live, or what you can do. It is merely a state of consciousness.

Look for the small things in your life that bring joy. Love others for who they are, without condition. Savor the time you have with others, the food you eat or merely waking up in the morning.

If none of these things work, here’s a simple exercise. Take anything or anyone you love the most. Take a few moments imagining they were taken away. Feel’s pretty bad doesn’t it? Now bring them back. How do you feel now? Grateful? Happy?

I hope so…

Happy 4th of July to my American Readers!!

See you tomorrow…