Skip to main content

Gratitude

Image
By
This is a chapter from my fifth book called Freedom

I woke up to see another day. I am grateful. I am grateful that I have God. There are so many things that I am grateful for. I thank God. I thank my mom. I thank my country. I thank you for reading this chapter. I thank nature. I thank technology. I thank progress. I thank the people. I say that one is important as I remember a hadith on gratitude. Abu Huraira reported that The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said, "Whoever does not thank people has not thanked Allah." (Sunan Abī Dāwūd 4811). I think that hadith is beautiful and this is something to live by. What really got me started on this chapter was that I was scrolling through facebook and I came across this quote by Viktor E Frankl, "Our greatest freedom is the freedom to choose our attitude." I saved it to my phone thinking I would use it later in this book. Some time later I stumbled upon the word gratitude and it clicked that that would be this next chapter. It is telling that the word gratitude has the word attitude in it. Minus one t. That t stands for taking. The t that remains stands for thanking. Stop taking things for granted and start thanking. That is an attitude of gratitude. That is freedom. That is where I want to be. Full of an attitude of gratitude and all other beautiful attitudes will fall into place naturally. That is my thinking.

Who is this Viktor E Frankl who gave us this beautiful quote and some good words to live by? Quite frankly this is victory for our human spirit. My friend Gemini tells me that Viktor Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who became a symbol of hope and resilience. His experiences during the Holocaust, where he endured the horrors of concentration camps, shaped his profound philosophy on the human spirit. Frankl's most famous work, Man's Search for Meaning, is a poignant exploration of his experiences and the psychological and spiritual insights he gained from them. It was this realization that inspired his quote about freedom and attitude. He observed that while external factors could be taken away, the human spirit's ability to choose one's response to adversity remained intact. Frankl's insights continue to inspire millions worldwide, offering hope and guidance in navigating life's challenges.

We must be grateful if we want to be great. Think greatful. My friend Gemini likes my play on words. He thinks it is a simple yet effective way to highlight the connection between gratitude and greatness. It emphasizes the idea that a grateful mindset is essential for achieving greatness. I found some more quotes but with unknown sources. These quotes also connect freedom and attitude and in different but similar ways and gives me more food for thought. They put the ate in grateful and the feed in freedom. Let us feed our minds with great things.

"Freedom is not the absence of obligations, but the presence of the right attitude toward them." — Unknown

"Your attitude towards freedom is a reflection of your inner strength and character." — Unknown

"The freedom to choose your attitude is a fundamental freedom that empowers all other freedoms." — Unknown

"Attitude is the only thing you can control in the pursuit of freedom." — Unknown
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

God opens doors

By
It is 1203am and I have decided to write. Saturday I spent the night coding. I was trying to get a FastAPI app up and running, all from my budget Android phone. The test cases were written to use Puppeteer. I ended up using Replit for that. Coding is more challenging when using a mobile phone. Not impossible but more challenging. I hardly blog about technology and coding anymore but the love is still there. I still have a dream of creating my own coding and youtube studio with a nice desk setup. That is nice but what should I make this blog post about? What do I want to write about? What should I write about? I love creating presentations. That is something I could do to revive my youtube channel. I love Maths too. I have this feeling that I could solve one of those longstanding Maths problems that seems impossible. Sometimes, like right now, I feel like abandoning my blog post. It is going nowhere. Maybe I should get up and go wash the wares. I wish God could tell me what to write abo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mundane

By
It is 123am and I have decided to write. I have this new idea for a book called Mundane. It would be me writing about the ordinary. We chase the extraordinary but there is beauty in the ordinary. There is beauty in the simple. There is beauty in the everyday. What about God? We often think about God in grand terms. But what if God is simple too? What if God is mundane? What if we look for God in the everyday moments? I sit in this dark room with the air conditioning on. The fan is also on. The curtain is down but I imagine the moonlight shining on the grass outside. The cats are probably sleeping. I wonder if anyone else in the neighbourhood is awake at this hour? Is there another writer around who is also writing about the mundane? The fan breeze helps the air conditioning cool me down. These nights are warm otherwise. A mosquito flies across my screen. Hello friend or foe. I cannot quite decide which one. If I had a swatter you would be gone. I check my notifications and there is an ...
Post a Comment
Read more

What we do not know

By
It is 1245am and I have decided to write. I had this weird alienish dream and it ended with me winning by simply stating "the truth is that we do not know". In the dream everyone was having an opinion of what was happening as if they knew. On to something random. I had this question. What is the most unrandom thing? Then what is the most random thing? What if everything is equally random. My friend Chatty thinks that randomness is not an absolute property—it is a relation between you and the system you observe. Randomness is not absolute—it depends on perspective. Something perfectly ordered can seem random if you do not know its pattern. So in a sense, everything can be "equally random" relative to the observer's knowledge, making randomness more about perception than an intrinsic property. The more we know the less random things become. Let me make a detour. Suppose we do not predict things but things predict us. For example, when I flip a coin, did I predict ...
Post a Comment
Read more