How to find gratitude when you most need it

Cultivating a gratitude ritual isn't just for Thanksgiving. How remembering to be thankful each day kept me afloat through a year unlike any other.

With my people gathered around the table—maybe eight or ten of us, maybe eighteen or twenty, depending on the year—my Thanksgiving dinners were always punctuated by this ritual. Before the meal, I asked each person to express what they were thankful for, and we all witnessed their gratitude before sharing our own.

It occurred to me at those gatherings, and many times since, how special those moments were and how uplifting an intentional practice around gratitude could be. But then, life gets busy, we get distracted, and remembering to be thankful for the blessings in life would inevitably drop way down my to-do list—perhaps yours, too?

So today I’d like to suggest a few ways to cultivate the daily practice of gratitude that, has helped me stay anchored in a year when I made the decision to leave my long marriage and became the full-time live-in caregiver for my mother with dementia. A year in which I moved house twice and will soon make a third move before the year ends. A year in which almost nothing was recognizable about my life but when I became my truest self. A year in which the woman who had been in hiding emerged into the light of deep self-regard and appreciation for all that she had been and all she had yet to become.

When I focus on gratitude, it inspires all four of the Cs that guide my life: Clarity, Connection, Community and Creativity. I hope you’ll find these practices, rituals, teachers and conversations inspiring for cultivating your own gratitude. You’'ll find an audio version at the end of this newsletter.

I want to take this moment to say how grateful I am to the readers of this Substack newsletter. Writing it has been the medicine for my soul I didn’t know I needed. Thank you for being here.