Pause for a moment and pay attention. You are breathing. Your heart is working. Your eyes can read these words. None of this was guaranteed, yet it is easy to forget.
We wake each day assuming we deserve another sunrise. We move through life demanding more, while the good already around us fades into the background. The things we once prayed for become things we take for granted.
Ingratitude is a quiet destroyer. It takes a life full of blessings and convinces you that you have nothing. It turns wealth into scarcity, comfort into dissatisfaction, and freedom into frustration. It creates poverty of the spirit long before there is poverty of circumstance.
A person who has sight but focuses only on what they lack is already blind to abundance. Someone who has bread but is bitter because a neighbour has more is already starving emotionally. This mindset is a choice, and it comes with consequences.
Every minute spent dwelling on what is missing steals time from appreciating what is present. The air filling your lungs, the people who care about you, the ability to think, to hope, to try again—these are not small blessings. They are everything.
Life never promised to be easy. Struggle is part of the journey. The fact that you made it this far deserves gratitude on its own.
Gratitude is not accidental. It is a practice. A habit. A decision to notice the good. When life becomes tough—and it will—gratitude keeps us grounded. Not because we are thankful for the pain itself, but because even in hardship, something remains: our values, our resilience, our ability to choose how we respond.
A grateful person cannot be easily broken. They build their life on what cannot be taken away.
So today, pause. Count what remains instead of what is lost. Appreciate those who stand with you. Honour the path that shaped you. Recognise how far you have come.
Let gratitude guide how you see the world and how you treat the people in it. Let it be your first thought in the morning and your final reflection at night.
Because a grateful heart does more than survive. It truly lives.
By Samuel N. Jacobs-Abbey