The Value of Gratitude

Have you ever wondered how many days you have left on Earth?

The average human spends roughly 79 years or 28,835 days on Earth. So, there is an average of 692,040 hours in a lifetime. At the moment I am writing this, I am 12,222 days old, That's 33 years and 169 days, including 8 leap days. In other words, I have 16,613 days or 2,373.28 weeks left. ( You can do yours on the following link: http://jalu.ch/coding/days/en ), and yet I wonder what I have done in my life and how much of that has been productive or at least beneficial to me or others.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama in his book The Art of Happiness mentions that the very purpose of our life is to seek Happiness. whether one believes in a religion or not, we are all seeking something better in life. on the other hand, the concept of achieving true happiness has always seemed elusive, ungraspable. even the word "Happy" is derived from the Icelandic word happ, meaning luck or chance.

The value of gratitude plays an important role in our pursuit of happiness, in other words not to have what we want but rather to want and appreciate what we have.

Likewise, we all know we are going to leave this world one day, we take many things for granted. We wake up in the morning without a second thought for the fact that we are alive. We eat our breakfast and juggle our appointments with our loved ones rarely without even noticing how amazing it is to do all these things at once, without appreciating the good people around us, without knowing how wonderful it is even to have food in our stomach and a roof over our heads.

I learned the value of gratitude when I moved to Todos Santos, since the very first moment I arrived here, people were very friendly and I never felt alone, still, I cannot deny how much I missed my family (parents, sister, and daughter), friends even the food. This is when you truly value the good people and things around you.

There are a lot of opportunities to be happy around us, the only problem is that we complain more than we appreciate life, how many times we complain about little things, we wake up in the morning and look at the sky and because it is too sunny, we say Uff! it will be too hot, then when it is cloudy, we complain because it is not sunny, we are never happy with what we have.

Just recently, I was reflecting on the number of opportunities we lose sometimes, a very good example just happened a few weeks ago, a Free Course was offered to the local community at the place where I work. At first, many people were very interested, but then when the course started some people did not attend. I have to be very honest, I felt very upset since this had been a lot of work and basically at no cost for students. this is when I say "Never take things for granted". We sometimes think because something is free, it is not significant, so I do not have to commit.

Opportunities are out there, Happiness is everywhere, take full responsibility to what is more important for you, do what you love and love what you do and avoid things you don't need in your life.

Now the secret to my own happiness, my own good future is withing my own hands. I must not miss that opportunity.