It only has two rungs, but it can take you as high as you want to go.
The first rung on the ladder is what I call traditional gratitude. Traditional gratitude is event based and is a reaction to external circumstances. Somebody does something good and/or nice for you, and you respond by expressing you sincere heartfelt appreciation. You can be grateful for the specific act, the person or entity that provided it to you, or both. Traditional gratitude is essential to maintaining healthy relationships. It shows that you are socially well adjusted, and if you practice it regularly, probably your mom and your dog both like you, even if you don’t brush your teeth everyday. If you practice this form of gratitude flawlessly – congratulations! Your desk is probably very neat, I’ll bet your checkbook is balanced, and your elementary school teacher probably has a great smile from all the apples you brought her when you were a kid. All kidding aside, most people understand this form of gratitude fairly well and practice it with varying degrees of effectiveness.
The second rung on the ladder of gratitude is much more powerful and life changing. It is a form of gratitude independent of circumstances. It is gratitude for life itself and all experiences “good” and “bad”. With this perspective, you understand that each experience in life has the potential either to bring you joy, to teach you something, or to be a catalyst that causes you to grow; and you appreciate the opportunity each new situation brings to experience any or all of those outcomes. Your focus is no longer “I am grateful for this” or “I am grateful for that”, because both those expressions of gratitude imply that there is time when your are inherently less grateful. Instead, your mindset simply becomes “I am grateful” as an expression of who you are, and your level of happiness no longer depends on achieving specific, predetermined outcomes. For those familiar with either the “law of attraction” or the writings of Dr. Wayne Dyer or Deepak Chopra, this form of gratitude is similar to what you have read about when learning to manifest your desires. Grateful for the experiences of life itself, you unattach yourself from particular outcomes and the gratitude in your life becomes unconditional. You then free yourself up to have the opportunity to enjoy the wondrous feelings of being alive in each and every moment, regardless of circumstances. Of course, human nature being what it is, we don’t always pick the highest and best choices for ourselves, and there is really nothing wrong with that. How we experience our life is matter of choice. Abe Lincoln once said that “Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be”. Knowing that your gratitude and therefore your level of happiness is not bound by external conditions, you are free to make that choice for yourself in each moment of your life.
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