Hello friends! It’s the last Tuesday of November and time for another check-in with my OLW – Choose. If you’ve been reading along with me this month, you know that I’ve focused on Choosing Gratitude. I’ve shared a deep dive into four aspects of my life that regularly inspire gratitude (Dark Early Quiet Time, a Morning Walk, Fiction Matters, and Family). You might also recall that this year’s OLW and the “Choose Gratitude” idea was inspired by Diana Butler Bass’s book Grateful and the Thanksgiving Prayer she shared last year.
She shared another thought-provoking post this Thanksgiving suggesting we broaden our response to gratitude beyond the preposition “for”:
“Other prepositions open our imagination to see and experience gratefulness as something deeper than appreciation for things.”
Instead of simply saying what we’re grateful for, we could also consider these questions:
“To whom or what are you grateful?
What challenges have you been grateful through?
Have you been grateful with others?
Where have you discovered gratitude within?
Has something in your life been changed by being grateful?
In what circumstances have you experienced thankfulness?“
The four gratitudes I shared touched on most of these broader aspects – and my journal entries covered nearly all of them, but I realize I need to go deeper on gratitude with others. Gratitude for others is huge, but with?! …and then I see a link between my intentions for connection and gratitude that goes beyond anything I’d imagined back in January. and then I wonder … perhaps these monthly checkins are exactly that. perhaps these checkins answer those questions for all of us.
and … wow.
Thank you to Carolyn for hosting this meetup and making these connections possible. and thank you to all of you for making those connections real.
mere-et-filles 
Oh I like this so much – gratitude with. This really strikes my curiosity. Thanks
Introducing new prepositions and gratitude–I love this concept!! The fun wordplay, for starters–but it also really stretches how we think about gratitude. And then some. (As soon as you said ‘with’ I thought about all the times you’ve touched on ‘connection’ this year…) The 6 questions you listed make for a worthwhile exercise–and a fun one I think I’ll share with a friend when we get together with our journals next week. (And what better nod to the month of November?!)
these are beautiful thought provoking questions and it feathers out the whole concept of gratitude. Thanks for sharing!
You’ve really changed my perspective with this post. We always think about what we’re grateful for but rarely (if ever) of the other prepositions relative to gratitude. Thank you for giving me something to really think about.
A thought provoking post… wow. Thank you so much for sharing this, Mary. This month I focused on having gratitude in the completion of a day… just that day. I was not always successful… but I tried.
What a beautiful way to think about/”frame” gratitude! Thanks for sharing this, Mary! 🙂
When I think of you I see all the words, (with, through, within, by and in) IN YOU! Almost every time you post you are writing about your connection with gratefulness and all it means to you and to others. You give yourself, your time, and your heart so willing. You embody gratefulness, Mary.
This is an intriguing way of considering how gratitude works in our lives. Thank you!
Wow – thank you for this post. I feel like a copycat by saying that it’s so thought provoking — but it is! I’ve been inspired by your pursuit of connection in 2021 and have been thinking about how I can comfortably layer more connection into my own life next year. (I almost wrote “next life” — yikes! What am I doing to myself??)
Wow- now that certainly is a new way to approach gratitude! Thanks for sharing this.
Such a lovely post … Thank-you for sharing the questions with us, and sparking our own curiosity. Truly, you are a gift :).