How are you today? And how do you know?
In their book, ‘A Life Worth Living, a guide to what matters most’, Miroslav Volf, Matthew Crausman and Ryan Mckinally-Linz give us three facets that are almost universally held to be important elements of a thriving life. If your life is going well with desirable circumstances, feels good, and is lived well (out of your values) it is likely to be well on the road to thriving.
To these three I added a fourth. A thriving life is a life of impact beyond ourselves - perhaps as part of a bigger cause, or by leaving a legacy in a phase of life, a particular location, with particular people, or at the end of our mortal existence.
In this podcast we explore the first of these facets of a thriving life - a life going well - through the lens of gratitude. I share an exercise you can use to identify not just what you’re grateful for, but also what makes those objects of gratitude important for you. Create your own gratitude inventory as you identify what you are always, especially, unusually and surprisingly grateful for.
Once we start thinking about gratitude we find ourselves guided to explore wider issues - who and what contributed to those circumstances for which we are grateful. After all, we did nothing to create the world we were born into, and many of the circumstances that we enjoy are because of the actions of other people - actions that we didn’t, and in fact couldn’t, influence.
On this multi-layered journey of discovery, we consider where gratitude might take us, in the company of three fellow-travellers in life - a literal fellow-traveller on the UK railways, a cosmologist, and a fourteenth century English mystic.
Some helpful links
A Life Worth Living : A guide to what matters most
Revelations of Divine Love : Julian of Norwich
How to read Julian of Norwich : Podcast - Ryan Mckinally-Linz