If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough. ~Meister Eckhart
About a week after we had my stepmom’s celebration of life, out of nowhere, I heard “Tack så mycket” in my head. Swedish for “Thank you so much,” it’s a phrase I heard often growing up, a phrase I should be saying to her morning, noon, and night.
It came into my head again today when I got home, after a conversation I had with a friend wherein I told her I didn’t feel like writing about gratitude, even though with Thanksgiving on Thursday, it’s prime time for an appreciation reflection. It’s hip to be grateful these days. It’s become not just a spiritual practice like meditation and prayer but also marketable through all the usual channels. Are we more grateful as a result? I worry I’m missing something, that I’m not doing gratitude right, not journaling enough—or at all—about it, not feeling it enough, not spreading it around properly.
Hearing tack så mycket again in my head made me think it was my Swedes on the other side telling me that’s what I needed to write about whether I wanted to or not, maybe then a river of gratitude would flow from me. That phrase, first heard in my childhood, also made me wonder when I first learned about and expressed gratitude. At least initially, it was often tied to gifts.
My brothers and cousins and I had to write thank you letters to our grandparents for Christmas and birthday presents. Some of those letters are now in my possession. If they touched and amused my grandparents as much as they do me now, then they were well worth writing.
Gratitude is born of and begets love, so writing a thank you note is an act of not only gratitude but love. I’ve often thought it would take a book, possibly a series of them, to express the proper amount of appreciation to all the people I’ve met, known and loved and for all the care, kindness, forgiveness, gifts of every sort, and blessings that have been bestowed upon me, not only by people I know but by strangers. Maybe that’s in my future. For now, river flowing, tack så mycket to you, and you, and you!
Divine Ready 