Multiply the gratitude you experience
There’s a chestnut tree down the street which coincidently marks the “finish line” for my daily run. Over the past few weeks I picked up a half dozen chestnuts that glistened in the grass, most of which were still half covered by a prickly outer skin. While I intend to plant them next spring, they are now resting on top of my desk—but they can’t stay there much longer.
When I picked up the first chestnut, I looked up at the big tree and thought, “What might this little nut turn into ?”
This simple question set imagination my free. Looking 50 years out, I can envision a line of stately chestnuts. My anticipation turned practical as I wondered, “How do you plant chestnuts ?”
No surprise. The answers were easy to find on the internet. I discovered how tall they can grow and how far apart they should be planted, how and when to plant them and more immediately, how to prepare the nuts for the next 3 months, because they will not germinate if they don’t experience what they think is winter—so six chestnuts will spend the next 3 months in a sandwich bag filled with sand in our refrigerator.
All these tips. For me. Pretty amazing really.
The other day, a chestnut on my desk caught my eye and I thought, “What is the history of this nut ? Where did the parent tree come from ? And the tree it came from—right back to whenever ?” I also wondered, “And what about all the people who shared their knowledge on the internet—how did that come to be ?”
Then a teachable moment hit me—every time you anticipate something in the future, there are a bunch of people and factors from the past that makes your anticipation possible.
While being grateful for anticipation is one of my favourite types of gratitude—I now hold a special place for the the people and factors from the past that make anticipation possible.
So for you, whenever you’re grateful for something you anticipate, I believe you can multiply the gratitude you experience by asking yourself, “What am I grateful for related to everything making this possible ?”
