Welcome to Thanksgiving week!  In just two days here in the States,
our country will stop most of what it does each day in order to come
together and express our thanks for all that we have.  If you're in the
U.S., we wish you a beautiful holiday.  If you're not in the U.S., we wish
you a beautiful week full of thanksgiving and appreciation.

And in this special week, we definitely want to express our thanks
for you being here, on this planet with us and at this page with us.
We definitely do appreciate your presence!

Thanksgiving
Andy Rooney

 Gratitude Is Larger Than Life
Melody Beattie

Learn to Be Thankful
Jim Rohn

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Thanksgiving Day comes, by statute, once a year; to the honest person it comes as frequently as the heart of gratitude will allow.

Edward Sandford Martin

Thanksgiving Day is a jewel, to set in the hearts of honest people, but be careful that you do not take the day and leave out the gratitude.

E.P. Powell

A thankful person is thankful under all circumstances.  A complaining soul complains even if he or she lives in paradise.

Bahá'u'lláh

When it comes to the "Thanks" in Thanksgiving, I hope we don't use it without any thought the way we so often use the word.  I've often thought it ought to be called "Appreciation Day," but I realize that just doesn't have the same fine sound to it that "Thanksgiving" does.

Most of us go through the average days and weeks of our lives using those meaningless junk phrases that have no real thought behind them.  It takes a toothache, the loss of a job or a death in the family to make us recall how good things were when our teeth didn't ache, when we were employed and when everyone in the family was healthy.

The trick to being happy is to stop and think occasionally, during normal times, how good things are going.  At this very moment at Thanksgiving, my teeth don't hurt, I'm making a living and my family is fine.  I'm just going to take the day off and sit around appreciating how lucky I am, and I hope you can do the same.

Have a nice day.

* * * *

(Rest in peace, Andy--and thanks for sharing!)

Gratitude is Larger Than Life
Melody Beattie

One day, a friend called me on the phone. He was going through a difficult time and wondering if and when things would ever turn around and improve.  I knew he was in a lot of pain; I didn't know then that he was considering suicide.

"If you could give a person only one thing to help them," he said, "what would it be?"

I thought carefully about his question; then I replied, "It's not one thing.  It's two:  gratitude and letting go."  Gratitude for everything, not just the things we consider good or a blessing.  And letting go of everything we can't change.

A few years have passed since that day my friend called me on the phone.  His life has turned around.  His financial problems have sorted themselves out.  His career has shifted.  The two very large problems he was facing at that time have both sorted themselves out.  The actual process of working through these problems became an important part of redirecting the course of his life.

Someone once asked the artist Georgia O'Keeffe why her paintings magnified the size of small objects--like the petals on a flower--making them appear larger than life, and reduced the size of large objects--like mountains--making them smaller than life.

"Everyone sees the big things," she said.  "But these smaller things are so beautiful and people might not notice them if I didn't emphasize them."

That's the way it is with gratitude and letting go.  It's easy to see the problems in our lives.  They're like mountains.  But sometimes we overlook the smaller things; we don't notice how truly beautiful they are.

Identify problems.  Feel feelings.

But if you're going to make anything bigger than life, let it be the power and simplicity of these two tools:  gratitude and letting go.

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