Importance of Gratitude
“Gratitude turns what we have into enough”
Mom: You’re welcome! (Sarcastic way)
Daughter: What! (Rolled her eyes) She is your granddaughter for whom you have done babysitting.
Mom: I have not brought you up in this way: being ungrateful! I know I’ve done the duty of a grandmother but have you played your role of being my daughter? “It’s very hurtful”.
A single word of appreciation could save the mother from being hurt. We feel that our parents have to shoulder our responsibility. But do we not realise that saying ‘thank you’ is a token of respect to reciprocate the love and favour of our parents? Why did the daughter not express gratitude to her mom or did she really not realise that there’s a need to say ‘thank you’?
Gratitude is a feeling of being grateful. What stops you to express a feeling of appreciation to someone who favours you?
Obstacle to Gratitude, a phrase, has ruined many relationships or turns relationships sour. Plethora of reasons are there behind being ungrateful. According to best marriage counsellors in Delhi, pride, being the foremost cause, is a tumour of the soul; that never lets your soul heal. Pride of being perfectionist and ambitious feeds egotism. I would like to cite an example from my life experience:
I’ve brought up in a family where stereotypical values were not encouraged. In the 70's, a family without a son was assumed as an incomplete family but my father didn’t pay heed to any stereotype. My elder sister, being the eldest child, was supposed to take every decision. I often disagreed with her decisions but nobody listened to me. My sister is the fairest, gifted with perfect features, in the family. Her beauty besides holding the position of decision maker in the family, gave heed to her arrogance and pride; added fuel to the fire. My mother and I used to do household chores and her work also but she never said a single word of appreciation though she was very caring. She said that being a perfectionist in every work, she couldn’t give fake compliments. Her ungrateful behaviour affected our relationship. I couldn’t understand my whole life about what stopped her from being grateful or obliged to mom or me even though she knew that our favors helped her every time. Is this called superiority complex or over pride? Had she understood the real meaning of relations where ‘thank you’ is an essence to give flavours of happiness and affection, our relation would not have turned bitter. It is not like that I always express my gratitude to everyone. I am human, to err is human. I still regret a few episodes of my life where I feel I should have been thankful but I didn’t. Being interested in psychology and literature, I read about how to work on relationships. My relations with my sister are better but her habit of pretending superior and ungratefulness has changed less.
I feel that we should not let our relations and values of being grateful lag behind for participating in a race of ambition.
Malice and Avarice, along with pride, breed a sense of superiority that further leads to an ungrateful attitude and acts as an incubator of ingratitude says top marriage counsellors. In the present competitive scenario, everyone is busy feeding their desires to survive in the community. Man is living a mechanical life, losing ethics and values of relations. Competitive feeling gives birth to avarice. The more greedy you become, the less satisfied you get. Unsatisfied person can never be grateful to anyone for anything. Greed is the worst sin as it sustains arrogance and jealousy. From my perspective, earning money is not wrong but to prove others inferior to you is bad. The journey of life is incomplete if you cannot walk along with your ‘people’ and your thankless behaviour won’t let ‘your people’ come closer to you.
Have you ever realised why you go to a temple or worship? I think you all know the answer: to pay obeisance, to pay gratitude because you feel if you will be ungrateful to God you have to repent; to face adversity. If you cannot afford to be ungrateful to God then how can you sustain to live with ‘your people’ without being generous and grateful for all the favours you get from them!
For a blessed life; for a blessed relation, gratitude is an effective impetus to survive as a blessed soul. Being human, you can challenge any negativity or can eliminate unethical values from your life. Feeling of perfection, ideal and competition is not unhealthy but excessive feelings sow the seeds of sin; of ungratefulness. You give what you have. Your children should not remain untouched to the virtues that can nurture them with a sense of bliss.
Acknowledging gratitude should not be hindered due to excessive arrogance. Success cannot be achieved without your loved ones; without their support, don’t complain about the one thing that they haven’t done for you, but be thankful for the number of favours they have done.
“Gratitude, like electricity, must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.”
Never turn your back to your loved ones, instead, express your obligations and gratitude to them for being there for you…. always.
The key to a happy life is to pay gratitude.
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