The joy of small moments
Building your capacity to be grateful isn’t hard. It just takes practice.
Often it’s the little moments in life that give us the most joy and fuel our well-being, like a good coffee, meeting a friend, taking a deep breath or the chirping of a sparrow.
As Jon Kabat-Zinn puts it: “The little things? The little moments? They are not small.”
In the small moments there is the power to change the tone of your entire day.
The challenge, and the real benefit, is training gratitude to make it a spontaneous habit, so you’re naturally grateful throughout the day.
The key to turning gratitude into a habit is to give yourself , once a day, a moment of your ‘precious’ time and focus on the experience of gratitude. For this purpose, choose an event that you always repeat every day: waking up, eating, going to bed, brushing your teeth or starting the computer when you start working. Well, this event will coincide with the moment of your gratitude practice.
At the beginning, as a reminder to do it , you can put a small post-it with the words “Gratitude” in the upper corner of your placemat, if for example you choose the meal as a moment to experience gratitude, or on the mirror in the bathroom, or on the computers, etc..
Then recognize the people you’re grateful for and the things that happened to you during the day that you’re grateful for, like a slice of toast, the overall good health you have, the afternoon sun, and all the countless little good moments
Remember to dedicate a short space, but at least 15 seconds , in which you fully savor the experience of gratitude.
Only then does he start eating or doing anything else.
In a few weeks:
- when you sit down to eat or start working, you will automatically express and savor your gratitude;
- you will also begin to notice that the experience of gratitude becomes more frequent in the rest of your life;
- you’ll find that the little things start to feel somehow different, a real pleasure in the midst of trouble, an invitation to set aside anxieties and keep self-criticism at bay.
