It’s that time of year again.  The Christmas decorations are up in the stores, the radio is playing “Deck the Halls”, and that can only mean one thing, it’s only a few weeks before ….  Thanksgiving?

Aside from the annoyance of having retailers try to push the holiday shopping season forward every year, I look forward to Thanksgiving every year – I love mashed potatoes.  I also love the idea of a whole day devoted to giving thanks.

It may sound strange, but I was asking myself the other day “why is thanks-giving really that important”.  Many people talk about the power of gratitude, including me, but what does gratitude actually do?  Here are some thoughts I came up with.

It gives us a perspective on our life by allowing us to take a step back.

Giving thanks is an essentially metaphysical action – it requires us to in some ways “pause” from our moment to moment action to pay attention to something that we are grateful for.  By making us step back and take a more panoramic view of our life, gratitude can show how each piece of our life fits in with the others.  This is what perspective is, the ability to see how each of the seemingly unrelated pieces of our experience fit together into one whole.

For example, let’s say you had a really lousy day at work and the commute home was awful, but then you came home to a wonderful dinner that your spouse cooked.  By feeling gratitude you step back from the immediate frustrations you have.  You can understand how your job fits in to the overall scheme of your life, by providing a home and food, and you can see that you have a loving and caring partner.  It lessens the sting of the challenges of life.

It creates a bond between us and who we are thanking. 

Whether you are thanking a person, a Higher Power, or whatever, gratitude acknowledges the connection that we have with them.  When you say thank you to a friend, for example, it focuses your attention on the relationship you have with them, on that bond.

This often works well when you are thanking God, the Universe, the Big Cheese (whatever you want to call him, her, or it).  When you feel gratitude for what you have in your life, whether it is a relationship, prosperity, health, or anything else you are grateful for, it reinforces feelings of inter-connectedness with the bigger world.  There are huge benefits of feeling connected with something greater than yourself (although that’s a different article).

It changes our focus.

We are rarely thankful for things that annoy or anger us.  Usually we’re thankful for things that make us happy – and while thinking about things that we’re grateful for, we’re naturally thinking about the good things about them.  Every person, situation, and action usually has both positive and negative aspects.  Which aspects you dwell on is a huge determinant of your own personal happiness.

For example, when you think about the things you are grateful for in your spouse or children, you naturally dwell on positive attributes – things that make you happy.  Obviously, they still might not do the dishes, but you don’t have to spend time thinking about that.  It would only make you upset (and it wouldn’t get them to do the dishes any faster).  You can focus on the things you do like about them and this change in focus allows you to access the good feelings you have about them whenever you want.

Those are some ideas to think about as you gather around the table this year.  Thank you for reading this post.  I challenge you to have the most thanks-giving filled Thanksgiving ever. 

And have a fantastic after-turkey nap.