How refreshing it was to read a letter from Lynne West in this week’s Echo about gratitude! Rather than reading most of the weekly letters about whinging and whining on all sorts of issues, here is someone who gets their priorities right and speaks about gratitude. Thank you, Lynn West, for how refreshing your letter was.
Gratitude is my personal passion, and I love spreading the word about the power of gratitude at every opportunity. Writing daily as I have done in a Gratitude Diary for some eight years now, I am aware of the healing and health benefits of this daily habit of practising gratitude.
Whilst you are engaged in that act of writing, you are focused 100 per cent on what it is that you have to be grateful for – today, rather than focusing on what you don’t have, or worse still, on what someone else has that you want!
There is so much that we as individuals take for granted, e.g., we wake up each day still able to breathe and move freely; we can see, speak and hear clearly; and we can smell, taste, touch, and feel.
An Englishman friend of mine who has lived in Australia for 30 plus years once said that if you were born in Australia or are lucky enough to come and live in Australia, you should wake each day and think that you have won the lottery! That epitomises what gratitude is all about.
There is so much that many of us lucky enough to have been born here or to come and permanently live here take for granted. Lynne West’s letter this week summed it up perfectly. There is much for us living in this wonderful country to be thankful for – daily. I would love to see The Echo provide a ‘special space’ within its pages to enable more people to write about gratitude. This could start an online movement to awaken people to the power of daily gratefulness. Not just simple words, but actually living gratefully – daily! Thank you again, Lynne West, for your refreshing letter, and to The Echo for publishing it.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
