A Travel Guide to Life by Anthony DeStefano

Author:Anthony DeStefano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: FaithWords
Published: 2014-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

Part V

Focus on the Practical

“Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence. The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence.”

—VINCE LOMBARDI

“Nothing is impossible with God.”

—LUKE 1:37

15.

Gratitude: The Secret to True Wealth

Over the years I’ve read dozens of self-help books and hundreds of spiritual books, and I can tell you that they all agree on one point. They all insist that it’s impossible to be happy in this life if you don’t first know how to be grateful for the blessings you already have. As Cicero said, gratitude truly is the “parent of all virtues.”

Now I’ve used the word happiness a lot in these pages, but I want to be clear that happiness isn’t at all equivalent to “pleasure.” It’s possible for you to be extremely ungrateful and still experience many of life’s pleasures. In fact, if you’re an ungrateful type of person, I’d be willing to bet that you have experienced many pleasures. It’s one of the ironies of life that the least grateful people often lead the most hedonistic lifestyles. They almost become professional pleasure seekers, going from thrill to thrill, searching for that one high that will finally satisfy the deepest yearnings of their soul. Only they never find it, because they don’t have the faintest notion of what real happiness is all about. In the end, all the pleasures they experience do them no permanent good and only lead them to greater emptiness and despair.

Though they might not realize it, the main reason they don’t have the ability to be happy is that they’re not humble enough to appreciate the purest, most basic blessings of life, and so of course they can’t appreciate all the other, secondary blessings—like sensory pleasures. The fact never seems to dawn on them that merely multiplying pleasures doesn’t solve anything—not when the real problem is that they don’t know how to “appreciate” to begin with.

This isn’t a difficult principle to understand. It’s why we try to teach our children to say “please” and “thank you” whenever we give them things—so that they won’t turn out to be ungrateful when they grow up. We want them to understand that they really don’t have a “right” to receive nice things. Yes, we want to give them that ice-cream cone—but they don’t have a right to it. It’s not owed to them. They have to say please and thank you because they need to know that the ice-cream cone—and the video games and computer games and dolls and toys and the rest—are all gifts. We give them to our children out of love; out of a desire we have to make them happy. Not just because they want them.

Now, what happens when we don’t teach our children to be thankful? They come to expect everything, don’t they? They come to have no appreciation for the gifts they receive. They come to think that whatever they want, they deserve, that whatever they desire is theirs by birthright.

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