Grateful – today!

A brief vacation and a short hike take us past three peacefully resting calves. The sun is shining, the trees are in bloom and the grass is so bright green that it must be super appetizing for a cow. But at the moment the calves are lying relaxed next to each other, apparently enjoying the closeness and chilling out.

Cows are rarely found in a pasture nowadays. Most cows never experience such a luxury, but live day in, day out in a cowshed with their fellow cows. ‘I wonder if the cows are aware of the privilege they have of being able to stand in a pasture, enjoy the sun and run around? Probably not. They most likely don’t know any different.

And that brings me to a thought that has been running through my mind for the last few days. There’s a saying in English that goes: “You never know what you’ve got until it’s gone.”

I’ve had to say goodbye to a lot of things in recent years. Especially from skills that affect my body. This is often difficult and when I look back, it makes me long for what was “still possible” a few years ago. But when I thought about it over the last few days, I realized one thing: There are skills that I have today that may be gone at some point. So instead of being sad about what I can no longer do today, why not be grateful and enjoy what I can still do today? It may sound a bit heroic and is certainly not an attitude to life that just comes to me. But it is a thought that is worth pursuing. Because one day, some of the things I take for granted today might no longer be there – my ability to hear or see, for example. And that’s just the physical things. I can extend these considerations to other areas of life. For example, what about the people who are important to me? Am I really grateful for them and am I happy about them today? Or have they become such a habit that I would have to lose them first in order to appreciate them? What about material things like my apartment, my house or my car? Can I still look at them with grateful eyes or do I just complain about having to maintain and clean them?

These reflections spur me on to give my thoughts a new direction more often: “Rejoice in what you have today. Look at it with wonder and gratitude. Don’t take it for granted, but as a gift from the hand of your Father in heaven.”