If you are reading this text, there is a high probability that you are a citizen of a prosperous Western state. You have probably never experienced a war on your soil, you have a roof over your head and – in principle – you can go to a supermarket whenever you feel like it and satisfy your hunger and thirst. I’m not talking about luxury or freedom from worry, I mean the satisfaction of your basic human needs: Safety, shelter and food. These are fulfilled in your case. In addition, if you have a twinge somewhere, you can also go right around the corner to a doctor. And complain that you have to wait four weeks for a specialist appointment. You also have hot running water. We could go on like this. –
How often do you become aware of this grace bestowed upon you in your life? Never? Or when you see on television how three quarters of the rest of the world’s population is doing?
How do you deal with this grace of peace, shelter and food? Do you ignore them and rather get annoyed that in the eco-catalog the wool jacket you ordered is no longer available in your color? Or do you think that you have earned it all yourself? No pain, no gain?
– What influence do you have on the place where you were born and the circumstances there? There are places and times when, with „No pain, no gain,“ they would have quickly breathed your last in agony in a camp located in the wilderness. That would have been it.
– How much influence do we have? How much is it fate that makes the judgments about our lives? How do we deal with it? What about prayer at the lunch table? What about thanksgiving? What about a blessing spoken – at least in thought – when we kill and consume living things for our own lives (I’m talking about plants, too)?
Everything is given to us. Nothing we have earned.
Of the unnecessary material abundance one can perhaps say that one „earns“ it with us. Forced, would meet it better. It is so unnatural and such a sole birth of the mind knowing no limits.
Now one or the other will say: „If we did not do it ourselves and are only beneficiaries: But our parents and grandparents: THEY have created it all! For their and our good! “ – If the fate had arranged it differently, they would have created NOTHING. Also you have been in the hand of the fate which has made it possible for them only to act to her and your welfare. And to exaggerate it thereby.
It would make us happier if we could be consciously grateful that we are taken care of just like the blackbird in the trees. Just a little gratitude every day would be enough if we became aware of the blessings we are allowed to experience and the special blessings we receive.
Our basic needs as living beings are fulfilled. Perhaps gratitude makes it easier for us to overcome the pain, the hustle, the loneliness, the fatigue, and the emptiness that the material excess of our parents and grandparents gave us.
We have everything we need to live a happy life. We should give thanks for it every day. Each of these grateful thoughts comes back to us in a wonderful way. This does not mean that we will always experience happiness and joy. But we will experience that which is according to the natural course of the world. And not the empty exaggerations that leave us so lonely and rushed and tired and hungry in all the abundance that we still hypnotically believe we have honestly „earned“.