Gratitude

The beauty of the nature around us makes me grateful!

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about gratitude. Life doesn't always turn out the way we want it to - gosh, it only does once in a while - but there are so many things around us we should be thankful for, even basic things such as the fact that we have shelter, food and water, whereas such a large percentage of this world's population doesn't have even that.
I was away in Burlington this past weekend with family (more on that later in another post) when we stopped in a few shoe stores to a) try and find nice heels for my cousin's engagement party, which is in 2 months, and b) try and find any shoes at all because my feet are tiny and it's hard to find good shoes that fit. My sister got lucky - her feet are slightly bigger than mine and she almost never wears heels, yet she found cute heels and managed to walk well in them in 10 minutes, even if they were 4 inches high (she measured, haha!)
Me? Well, I tried on about 8 different pairs of heels, half of them didn't fit, and I felt like a cripple after trying each pair on for a grand total of 2 minutes each. I think I managed to walk around in 1 pair for 5 minutes before feeling like the bones in my feet were about to break.
I was feeling pretty crappy about it - I'm short, why am I the person who can't walk properly in gorgeous heels?
Then I realized - my situation, my life, could be so much worse. I could be poor, homeless, not able to even afford shoes. I could have had a crippling form of cancer that robbed me of my legs.

Now that the school year has started, I'm full into homework, assignments, essays, and tons of reading. It's busy and stressful and not always fun, sure, but I'm grateful for it because I'm getting an education that will help me get into higher education, which will help me follow my career interests and eventually get a good job that I enjoy. School can suck sometimes, but I'm grateful for it because I could be, as I said before, homeless and unable to afford school, or living in a third - world country where schools are scarce.

Sometimes, I get into arguments with my family members, and I really want to take out every penny in my bank account and move out, far away. But then I think - outside of this argument, I love my family like crazy, and I don't want to imagine my life without them, and they do everything they can to help me succeed, feel loved, and have a good life. Why do I take advantage of them, and not appreciate them as much as I could? I know people who have lost family members, sometimes at a painfully young age. How dare I complain about my family when theirs isn't even complete because of illness or tragedies?


I'm grateful for my adorable kitteh :3.

I think the issue of gratitude is very relevant for bloggers. If you're a blogger in general, you can either afford a computer or afford a tuition and can use the computers in your school, or you're lucky enough to live somewhere where there's a good local library. If you're a fashion blogger, for example, you're able to afford clothes to show off on your blog, which half the world can't. If you blog about your family, you're in good enough health to be able to conceive children, which many women and families aren't. If you're a cooking blogger, you're able to afford good enough food to make your blog interesting, which, again, half the world can't.
Do you see where I'm getting at? No matter where you look, you'll be able to find one area of your life where you're exceptionally lucky, or where you thought you weren't but realized you were after looking towards other, more unfortunate, people.

However, I can understand that sometimes you're in a bad mood; you're not being optimistic; life has got you down. I can understand that, and I try to counteract that everyday. A few ways I do that:
1) The first thing I do, upon waking, is telling myself 5 things I'm grateful for. This sets my day on the right path, since I start off the day by realizing how lucky I am, even if all I'm saying is that I'm grateful to be alive.
2) I fill out the Printable Pocket Goddess Gratitude Diary from Goddess Guidebook, a fantastic site run by Leonie, which deals with art, creativity, spirituality, and other cool stuff from the other side of the world in Australia. Anyways, the Gratitude Diary is a hand-drawn 3 week/21 day diary with headers such as "Today my life is the best ever because...", "5 ways my heart sung today", and "Holy dinger thank you today for...". It's simple, but I find writing it down has really helped me be more grateful.

The question for today - what are YOU grateful for? Do you have any tips for remembering how lucky you are, even for things as simple as just being alive?
I think we need a blogosphere-wide gratitude circle - every blogger tweeting or blogging about something they're grateful for. 
(Honestly, I think I'm starting to get sick of the superficiality of the fashion world in general. I think that, alongside our fashion interests, which I obviously support wholeheartedly considering I run a fashion blog, we should get back to the root reason some of us became bloggers - we can reach people far away we wouldn't have without a blog and we can try to influence them to be better and really question themselves and the status quo. Or something like that, it's just kind of been bubbling around my brain...)


XO,
Laura