Gratitude Mojo: Week 1 - Miracles

Noticing delightful surprises

                  (To see the whole vignette of GratitudeMojo, the Path, click here.)

True Story: About eight years ago, two brothers sat on the steps in Union Square in New York with a friend and decided to quit their jobs and make t-shirts. They wanted to live their dream of creating a company that aligned with their personal values and allowed them to have a positive impact on the world around them.

Step 1: Write a manifesto defining success.

Doesn’t every start-up write a manifesto first? Anyway, the manifesto went viral and the company progressed from t-shirts to a full, online store of inspirational products and tools to help people live a more meaningful life, plus a shared (digital) home for kindred spirits on the journey. It’s worth browsing around the Holstee.com store, but, first, watch this lovely video production of their manifesto. (You could just read it, but the video is more fun, especially if you ride bikes. Pay attention, the manifesto weaves through the video.)

To watch this video, click here.

Miracles. 

Willa Cather, American writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, says:

"Where there is great love, there are always miracles. Miracles rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming to us from afar off, but on our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us ALWAYS."

Holstee is a miracle. Too often we think of miracles as something like winning the SuperLotto or walking on water, completely overlooking the fact that the grass we walk on knows how to make sunlight into breakfast, and three guys can build a t-shirt shop into an online community that inspires and supports transformation.

Miracles come in all sizes, big and small. Last week one of my miracles was that I received an unexpected check for a foreign royalty on a book I published 32 years ago. It wasn’t a big check, but when a friend thought the idea of spending January snorkeling and kayaking in Baja, that little check helped me say Oh My Yes! 

Miracles also come in two types … one type is those unexpected surprises that make you smile (like my unexpected check); another is just noticing, really noticing, something familiar that makes you feel soft and warm inside … like the smell of a baby’s head, the feel of a gentle breeze on a fall day, a particular piece of music that takes you back to a special time and place, or a long, slow afternoon with a dear friend.

The more you notice miracles, of either kind, the more you will see them and the more opportunities you will have to feel grateful.

For those of you using the Gratitude Mojo journal/workbook, you get a chance to identify the miracles in your own life every week. Let’s kick off this week with this question:

What miracles, of either type, have you noticed in the past week?

We love your “hearts” and please feel free to share this post if you think any of your friends and family would like it.

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In good times and challenging ones, practicing gratitude helps us recognize the good things in our lives and build resilience for the challenges that come our way. Gratitude journaling is one of the best ways to better understand yourself and deepen your practice of gratitude.

Gratitude Mojo, the workbook/journal we are biased toward, is designed to guide you to a better life, in whatever way you define it. It comes as a printable pdf with paid subscriptions … and also includes a copy you can gift to a friend. We’ll write more about the transformative process of doing this work with a friend in future posts.