Recently, I’ve noticed something about gratitude that’s brand new for me. For years, it’s been easy for me to feel grateful for almost anything I happen to notice, but the sense of gratitude I felt was always attached to a specific thing. I might have felt grateful for something as small as the way the light changed on a cloudy day, or hearing my cat Munchkin purring in the middle of the night, or a cool breeze on a warm day.

Not long ago, after I finished my work for the day, I took a walk along the country road I live on. There are few people or cars on the road, I usually sing when I’m walking, and I don’t need to hold it in. I give myself over to it, I sing at volume, and I enjoy myself enormously.

At any moment, on any day of your life, love is flowing through you like a river. It’s as automatic as breathing, and just like you may sometimes hold your breath without realizing it, it’s likely you hold back that flow of love without knowing you’re doing it.

One of the strangely dependable qualities of miracles is that they appear when we’re least expecting them. This is a story of a miracle that happened to me last week at the hardware store. That particular store is enormous and was completely deserted when I arrived late one day. I wandered around looking for someone who could answer my specific hardware question and finally saw two guys at the end of an aisle. They were joking around together, and when they saw me approach, several things happened simultaneously. They adopted their “professional” demeanors, and I felt their protective screens go up. Humans tend to put up protective screens when approached

Have you ever had the experience of meeting someone and instantly feeling there was absolutely nothing that separated you? It’s helpful to understand exactly what’s going on when that happens. First of all, there was no impulse from either of you to judge the other person, so both of you were able to see through any apparent differences between you. Whether or not you’d put it in these words, you both recognized that you share the same being. When we believe we can only love someone if we know them, we’re ignoring the nature of love. Love doesn’t require us to know anything about a person; our nature is to

Our nineteen year-old cat, Mr. Blackie, died last week. He showed up on our porch one winter morning, and he’d clearly been living on the road for a while, He’d been in fights, he was skinny, and his coat was dull. Immediately apparent was his sweetness of spirit, which shone through all of that. The plan was to get him back in shape, then find him a good home with one of our friends. At the time, it seemed like we had too many cats (most of them “show-ups”) to take on another. A day or two later, I said to my wife something that was already obvious to both

Made New By Forgiveness The value of forgiveness and who benefits from it are almost always misunderstood and underappreciated. I suspect this is because when we forgive, or even think about forgiveness, we focus on the act we feel warrants forgiveness. If we’re the one who feels we’ve been badly or wrongly treated, coming to terms with the transgression can seem like a big job. That focus veils some of the real benefits of forgiveness. If we struggle to forgive, it means resistance is playing a part in our struggle. Remember, resistance is being of two minds about something at the same time. We’re trying to say, “yes,” and “no”

We Never Know How Many Lives We Touch Yesterday, I was at a celebration to honor an old, dear friend who had recently retired from a long, distinguished career as an architect. We were in a lovely hall his wife had beautifully decorated with drawings, plans, elevations, and photos of various projects he had conceived and built. Over a career spanning fifty years, he’d completed more than 500 projects. There were homes, university buildings, veterans’ memorials, civic buildings, all of them beautiful, unique, and highly practical. A number of us spoke movingly of our friendship with him, what it was like to work with him, and what it was like

Real Compassion Compassion means to feel along with others There may be a reason why we see less real compassion in the world than we’d like to see. Though it’s a word we hear often enough, just exactly what it seems to be largely misunderstood. Compassion means to feel along with others. When you feel compassion toward someone, you’re putting yourself in their shoes, making an effort to feel what they may be going through. This is the element of compassion that’s widely understood. Somewhere along the way, another quality became linked with compassion, to the point where this quality is routinely mistaken for compassion itself. The quality I’m hinting