A Grateful Life Is a Meaningful Life

Living gratefully changes how you respond to challenges and opportunities. Silver-lining thinking and toxic positivity are not gratitude, but distractions from living your life as a gift. The practice of living gratefully invites you to respond to your life with an open heart.

5 Ways Living Gratefully Empowers You to Live a Meaningful Life

1. Grounds you in the present

Being fully present is not always easy. Gratitude reminds you that your life is a gift and you can choose how to live in this moment, even if the circumstances are presently uncomfortable.

2. Helps you embrace and live into the paradoxical realities of life

Life is seldom black or white, good or bad, joyful or sorrowful. Living gratefully helps you appreciate the wide range of emotions, experiences, and contradictions life has to offer. By practicing gratitude, you learn to live with and embrace this complexity rather than choosing one extreme or the other.

3. Provokes curiosity and expands your perspective

It is easy to get habitually caught up in your thoughts, feelings, and assumptions. Gratitude extends an invitation to explore your world with curiosity, openness, and a desire to understand your life more fully. When you practice gratitude, you lean into the moment and discover what is meaningful in your life right now. This includes the joy of relationships, the awe of nature, the fulfillment that accompanies purposeful work, and the possibilities on the other side of uncertainty.

4. Reminds you to live like today is your first day and also your last day

Life is temporary. Because it can end at any moment, you are invited to cherish every day with the reminder that this may be the last one you experience. While that can be a jolting way to encounter a day, you are also invited to live as if today was your first—to see anew and to notice aspects of your life that you overlook or take for granted. The practice of grateful living encourages you to approach your life with a child’s curiosity and appreciate the gift of life. In this witnessing, you discover meaning and purpose and become more alive.

5. Enhances contentment

Grateful living empowers you to embrace what you have by appreciating the life you have been given. Instead of pursuing more possessions, allowing ambition to carry you away from yourself, or waiting on the what if’s, living gratefully reminds you that you are here and that is enough.

As Br. David Steindl-Rast says, “It is enough to give thanks for the next breath.”

Interested in the grateful life? Visit grateful.org/welcome to learn more and start your practice.