Music Dear friends,
Welcome to this meditation in which I share some thoughts on gratitude.
I hope these reflections will encourage feelings of gratitude in each of us.
And I hope that through the practice of gratitude we will find happiness increase day by day.
First of all,
An invitation to take a few moments to relax and come into awareness.
Close your eyes if you wish.
Music Take a few deep breaths and leave the cares of life aside just for these few minutes.
Music An opening reflection.
In the busyness of my day I sometimes forget to stop to express gratitude for all that is good in my life.
My blessings are truly beyond counting.
So when I do manage to stop and think,
I find my heart is filled with gratefulness.
For the gift of living.
For the ability to love and be loved.
For the opportunity to see everyday wonders of creation.
For sleep and water.
For a mind that thinks and a body that feels.
I have to be thankful too for those things in my life that seem challenging,
Unfair or difficult.
They teach me to take pause,
Take a breath,
Come back to the moment.
Even the things I do not wish for,
The trouble and pain I would rather avoid,
Force me to grow and learn.
May I be thankful for all things.
Music There is a Japanese practice of self-reflection which helps to arouse a feeling of gratitude.
This practice is based on three questions.
What have I received from others?
What have I given to others?
What difficulties or trouble have I caused others?
If we stop to consider our lives as a type of balance sheet,
It can be very enlightening.
When you compare all the benefits coming in with the few deeds going out,
It can be a rather sobering exercise.
If you look to your right and your left,
You notice an endless source of benefits previously taken for granted.
Makes us realise that the world owes us little or nothing.
Indeed,
As I did,
You may find yourself heavily indebted to the world and to its people.
In the journey of life,
We resemble explorers working our way through a thick forest.
In that forest,
Everything we come across is benefit upon benefit.
But with eyes closed,
We press on unthinkingly.
We believe each of these things to be obstacle upon obstacle.
We slash and we complain as we try to fight our way blindly to what we wrongly perceive to be dense,
Menacing undergrowth.
But when we look with eyes of gratitude,
We see the world and the people around us in a new light.
We see things in their right light.
Let's pause for a few moments to reflect on the balance sheet of our lives.
See how much we have given.
See how little we have paid out.
We wake up each morning and mostly we feel fine.
We open our eyes.
We hear the first sounds of the day.
We stretch,
Emerge from a warm bed to a warm room,
Visit the bathroom for a morning pee.
We flush the toilet,
Find clean water on tap.
We wash,
Clean our teeth,
Dress,
Enter the kitchen,
Press the switch,
Make a cup of tea or coffee,
Have breakfast.
This everyday morning ritual provides us with an ideal opportunity to notice the benefits that we have so often taken for granted.
We have family,
Friends,
Rest,
Shelter and the comforts of home.
We enjoy light and heat,
Drinking water,
Sanitation,
Clothing,
Footwear.
We have food for breakfast,
Refrigeration,
Power and all this before we have scarcely begun the day.
We complain when the breakfast cereal runs out.
But it would be more beneficial to us to remind ourselves of the many days when the supply does not run out.
Think of the ingredients,
Even for the breakfast.
The planting,
The careful cultivation,
Harvesting,
Packaging,
Transporting of this everyday commodity.
Finally,
It lands on a supermarket shelf.
There we select it from an astonishing variety of different possibilities.
All this variety offered to us in this amazingly beneficent world.
Yet we can mindlessly munch our breakfast as we direct our attention to the TV.
We have our dinner as we read the newspaper.
We absorb ourselves in our electronic devices and all the while planning other things to do.
Let us pause to reflect on the benefits that come to us as we awake to life each morning.
On the 17th of December,
1903,
Orwell Wright piloted the first powered airplane.
That flight in North Carolina lasted just 12 seconds.
Amazingly,
Only 66 years later,
Men were walking on the moon.
Today,
It is commonplace for millions of people to enter metal cylinders.
They are whisked across the world without as much as a thought as to how outlandish and marvellous is this procedure.
The miracle of flight goes unnoticed,
Especially by frequent travellers.
We complain about the tedium of air travel,
The boredom of long flights,
The quality of the food.
We moan about the shortage of leg room,
The non-availability of in-flight internet communications.
All this as we rise above the clouds,
Hardly bothering to look down upon the earth.
We enjoy a comfortable and stress-free landing in a different country or on a different continent.
Think of the air-conditioned comfort,
The clockwork reliability,
The ever-increasing safety control systems,
The worldwide interconnected system of air traffic control,
The worldwide network of airports,
The pains taking investigation of the reason for each rare mishap.
Yes,
Indeed we endure the unavoidable tedium of managing to get to and through airports.
We have to undergo the ever more detailed security checks.
We note the frustrating but understandable restrictions on what we can bring with us.
But left to our own devices,
There is the human tendency to bring all our possessions with us on every flight.
But these inconveniences are a small price to pay when flying.
Just stop to consider the wonder that is our ability to join the boards of the air in the magic of flight.
Let's spend a few moments giving thanks for the miracle of flight.
You lift a little instrument,
Press a button,
And without further thought you are connected to someone across the world.
In the late 19th century telephony was in its infancy.
Telephone lines individually connected between subscribers.
Next we had manual and then automatic telephone exchanges.
Today we have almost universal access to telephones.
In the 1970s mobile phones appeared,
Initially expensive,
Unwieldy and cumbersome devices with limited usage and long recharging times.
Mobile phones have become cheaper,
Smaller and more powerful.
Today's average smartphone is much more powerful than the computers that were used to bring people to the moon in 1969.
Something considered to be a miracle by one generation is routine to the next.
When we next reach for what has become a now standard mobile phone.
When we make a call,
Skype a friend,
Send a text,
Check the weather,
When we ask Google for something,
Check the news,
Explore the maps,
Listen to our music,
Book a ticket and God only knows what else.
We might first stop and express gratitude for that little miracle machine.
Einstein captured the idea perfectly when he said,
There are only two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is America.
The other is as though everything is America.
Let's pause for a few moments of quiet gratitude for the gift of modern communications.
Finally,
For today,
A litany of gratitude.
This is a mixed list of some of the taken for granted benefits of everyday life.
Something to trigger your thoughts of all the many reasons you have to express gratitude.
For the chair you sit upon,
For your feet,
Your shoes,
For the floor and the carpet,
For the window and the daylight outside,
For your family,
Your home,
Your neighbours and friends,
For your colleagues and cooperators,
For holidays,
The sea,
The waves,
The sand,
For mountains and hills,
For forests and fields,
For rivers,
For lakes,
For sunrises and sunsets,
Which mark the start and the end of each of our days,
For our bodies and our brains,
Our intelligence and our skills,
For the gift of memory,
For music and the content of books,
Our ability to read,
For the cinema and the theatre,
Actors,
Actresses,
Performers,
Entertainers,
For philosophers,
Thinkers,
Social scientists and inventors,
For surgeons,
Doctors and nurses and care workers,
For hospitals,
Operating theatres,
Anaesthetics,
For festivals,
Sports and games,
For stadia and sports venues,
For starlight and moonlight,
Telescopes and microscopes,
For the Hubble telescope,
For the moon,
For the sun which gives life,
For the rotation of the earth which gives us our days and the earth's tilt giving us the seasons.
We could go on and on and on.
But I will pause now so you can reflect on the benefits of your own life before we conclude this reflection.
A thought before the closing bell.
For all these numberless benefits,
For all the impossible to list people,
For each and every one of our thousand and one supports in this wild and wonderful life,
May each of us be truly grateful.
Namaste.
A thought before the closing bell.
Thank you.
