Gratitude has been a part of my life since I learned the song ,” count your blessings” in Sunday school . I really engaged in the practice of being grateful when I worked on a gratitude sheet . This was a suggested practice by a self-help book I was reading on feeling good by Dr Burns . I’d been depressed for sometime and was willing to try anything to feel slightly better about myself and my life . It worked . Daily , I wrote down both big and mundane things I was grateful about in my journal . Ignorable things like being grateful for the sun shining in my face or that the communal tap in my area is nearly at my door , meaning I do not have to carry large bottles to fetch water ,elevated how I felt about myself.

What I never pictured was that feeling grateful on behalf of others could be beneficial too . I actually stumbled on that one by chance . I happened to meet the father of a boy slightly younger than me I grew up with . He updated me about his life ; that he was enjoying playing soccer at an academy and just starting out to discover relationships . We joked about him loving and relating with girls . In the past , knowing that the boy’s mother died quite young , having witnessed her battle substance abuse and neglecting the boy, whenever I saw or thought of this boy , all I could really do was feel sorry for him . Pain and grief always descended upon me whenever I happened to think about them as a family . This day was different . Suddenly, on behalf of the boy and his family I felt gratitude . I felt gratitude that he enjoys sport, has a lovely and caring father and is still going to school . All my personal problems I had been nursing at that moment were alleviated and I felt better .

I tentatively used this process of feeling gratitude for others to battle envy . A young woman I grew up with had just got a job at an auditing firm. It would have been easy to compare as we’d had a very similar childhood with similar challenges and opportunities. I forget this author who proclaimed , if I recall properly , ” everytime a friend succeeds, a piece of me dies.” Envy can be bad because it diminishes one’s self esteem and respect . It will make you overlook your own achievements and little strides . Anyway , I decided to employ this thought frame and felt such gratitude to God , the universe and the young woman’s resilience for having been able to beat the odds and make it out of our semi-township . I had a good night’s sleep and the idea to write this essay . Yes, to be thankful on behalf of somebody else made me rest well and be creative . Perhaps you could try it too.