Waiting is a Blessing

Thinking more on the issue of gratitude and looking at my own experience I couldn’t help but think about two incidences that I observed while traveling recently. One of these times we were waiting for our bags at baggage claim for maybe 10 minutes, when a guy standing next to me started complaining aloud about having to wait. He went on for a while before he finally blurted out “Delta always does this to me!” I thought to myself, does this guy actually thinks Delta is picking on him? Only a minute later the bags came down the chute but instead of being grateful he grabbed his bags in a huff and stomped out of the terminal. I was certain his blood pressure was pushed to some upper limit by then. And all over a couple minutes of waiting.
 
The other time was in the very well-appointed Delta Crown room in the Los Angeles airport. A young woman was loudly complaining to someone on her cell phone about her flight being canceled the night before. It seems the airline put her up in a Marriott Hotel, complete free with meals, at their expense. But instead of being grateful that the airline did everything they could to make her comfortable during an unavoidable delay she acted as if the event was destroying her life! And all I could think of was how she’d do at an airport in Libya which was dealing with a severe uprising that week.
 
Both these people had lost complete perspective on the situation they were in. It used to take days or weeks to travel from one major city to another in the US. In other parts of the world, it still does. And you don’t always get your bags back or have a flight available at all. We should be immensely grateful when things work expediently and ideally. We should be grateful we can travel rapidly and in great comfort. We should also be grateful, when we do have to wait, that we are given that opportunity to stop and appreciate all we see around us, and all that we have. Even the moments we have to stand still are something to be grateful for, if only we would stop and realize it.

Commitment to Gratitude

As I look out at the world, especially in the incredible times we live in right now with all the turmoil, uprising, pointless deaths, instability and chaos in so many places in the world, and then look outside my door, it’s hard not to be a little shocked by how different my life is here in an affluent, developed country. Even some of the arguably most powerful men in the world do not live as well as many of us do here. Look at Bin Laden, found living in relative squalor until his demise.

When I see these things I am struck big time with the thought that, wow, we really do have it good, those of us living in the USA, Canada, Europe, etc. But how often, and seriously, do we consider how blessed we are?

I don’t know about you, but I am so very, very grateful for my life in a free country. My gratitude, however, goes way beyond the free country thing. I have to tell you, when i take time to be grateful (and i really need to do it more often), that very process and feeling of gratitude boosts my satisfaction, contentment, and happiness levels! It’s almost like magic.

So I’m thinking, this month, let’s start a habit of gratitude, hitting that button 2 or 3 times a day. Appreciating what we have will be good for our spirits, our attitude, our family, our outlook on life, and, by extension the world out there that is working through the chaos and pressure of broad and often, unstoppable, change. It’s the least we can do for them, and ourselves.

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