On Breath, Life, Death, and Gratitude.
The river of life that flows within us.
Five years ago today, my grandfather (who we called Peep) passed away. I wrote a blog post that day about Gratitude and Living Life and Sending Love to The Ones You Love. It was titled “Be Thankful.”
I read it at his funeral and didn’t make it through the first time - an uncontrollable amount of tears unexpectedly got in the way.
I’ve spent the past hour trying to find that writing to share again today and apparently, I deleted it off of the Fit University website where it was originally published. I’m trying to recover it via WordPress but in case we can’t, I imagine in that blog post from 2014, I said something like this.
Be grateful for what you have, every bit of it, because you never know when it will no longer be there. That goes for things, items, and people. We hear this all the time, right? How many cliches do we hear that we don’t actually take time to truly consider and implement? To stop and live in the space of what it would feel like if whatever no longer existed in our life. When we allow ourselves to step into that space of imagining what life would be like without whatever, it often allows us to appreciate whatever with wider, open arms.
Enjoy life, every bit of it, because you never know when it will shift or leave completely. What a precious gift this thing of life is. So much beauty to see, people to meet, lessons to learn, sensations to feel, love to be shared, joy to be had. Are you allowing the preciousness of life to seep into your being on a daily basis, or are you allowing your days to pass by in a way that feels like stress, struggle, anger, or perhaps with the guiding thought of, it will get better when…?
Express your love and gratitude for all, consistently and constantly. How will the thing or person know you appreciate them if they’re not told? Why is expressing gratitude important? Without even looking to the science of gratitude, we can notice within ourselves.
Think about a time when you felt wholeheartedly grateful for something. THANK YOU SO MUCH!! You might have screamed as you threw your arms around a friend with open arms.
What did that feel like?
On the flip side, think back to a time when you were on the receiving end of that hug.
What did that feel like?
I’ll now refer to that feeling, whatever it felt like to you, as a little jolt of love (our science friends might call it dopamine + serotonin).
When we express gratitude, a little jolt of love flashes through our body.
When we receive gratitude, a little jolt of love flashes through our body.
When we express gratitude and someone else receives it, a collective jolt of love is released out into the world during that exchange. That love lives on for others to access. That love lives on for you to more readily access again.
During a morning meditation a few weeks ago, I began to notice how seamlessly breath flowed in and out of my body. How perfectly that life force sustained me without any guidance or effort on my part. Every inhale and exhale an affirmation to the world, I am here. That day happened to be Peep’s birthday, 11/11. He would have been 92!
I remember being with Peep on his last night, heading to the hospital with my mom when she got a call sometime around midnight that his time was limited. I remember the room, bright and somewhat warm in nature, with Peep’s bed in the middle. One that looked less like a hospital bed and more like a twin sized bed you would have slept in as a kid.
What I remember more than anything from that night was his breathing, how forced it was. Long breaths, yet staccato all at once. Breath that wanted to be full and deep but no longer had the capacity to do so. Breath that was so audibly fighting to keep life alive, and was so clearly losing force in that fight.
Breath, our life force.
The flow that keeps us connected and alive to the world around us.
The ever present river of life that lives within us. That we often take for granted, ignore its presence, forget what a powerful force it is. It’s a force of nature, that breath of ours. It sustains us, grounds us, awakens us, energizes us.
If we acknowledge it. If we let it. If we focus on it.
A moment to pause.
A moment to breathe.
A moment to affirm to the world, I am here. I am well.
A moment of gratitude for breath; for the river of life that flows within us.
