Gratitudes

With all that has been going on in our family, one thing remains constant, there are more things to be grateful for then to complain about. In every single hard thing, there are 10 things to feel blessed about. I can feel extremely grateful for everything in my life, even the hard things.
Often times I think about the way people need to hear things a certain way, if its not spoken of in just the right phraseology, they will not accept it. The truth can be the very same spoken each way, but accepted in just one way. To me its a bit narrow minded, because truth or the sum of things can be found when we are walking on different roads but with the same destination. Just think about Map Quest on the computer. You look up an address to give someone direction to a place you know how to get to, but you want to hand them a print out or tell them to go 1.3 miles then turn left, you want to give them better details than to say, "well at the next red house, go a ways down the road and then turn right at the blue house." How you get there and how MapQuest tells you to get there can be very different, but the truth remains that you will reach your destination using either way.
I am grateful for a lesson learned in the round about way that allows me to be grateful for just about everything in my life. This lesson was about not being attached to things. I suspect this lesson is called different things, has different labels, such as "all things belong to God," and taught in a different way the teaching of letting go and not being attached to things, which is the way I finally learned to let go and just be grateful for each and every experience without wanting to hold on with my own tight grip beyond the time I was supposed to.
So today, this bright Saturday morning I am grateful for what I have, what I had and what I will have. I am grateful for the hard things in life that teach us, stretch us, make us able to relate to others during their hard times and show compassion and how hard things make us softer if we allow that to be.
For the good things and so many they are... I am grateful for the joy, the happiness, the pleasure, the feeling of "lightness" that they give to us and for the things to come, they give us hope and so much to look forward to. Today, I am grateful for life in all its complexity that when looked at openly is all so very simple.

my two sweet grand-dadughters, not sure how much they liked having their picture taken together !