A Life of Gratitude

I have a 30 minute commute to work -- not too bad when compared to the rest of the commuting world -- and to pass the time I listen to audio books.

Listening to this one book, this teenage character describes how his mother's life is just one disaster after another and how she never seems to get ahead and I found myself thinking, "I know just how you feel." But, if I'm being honest here, that's not really true.

I do know how it feels to feel like everything you touch turns out wrong, and how even when you're trying to do something right, it blows up in your face. But in reality, I find myself more and more living a life of gratitude.

As I get older, the things I am grateful for change. Every night I get into bed and say, "Thank you, Lord, for a soft, comfortable bed," because I know there are people out there who are sleeping in the streets. When I eat a meal I send up an offering of thanks because there are people who don't have the means to feed themselves or are stuck eating pre-packaged food because they never learned to cook. The simplest of tasks become, in and of themselves, an opportunity for gratitude, because there are many who cannot perform even the smallest task.

Recently I had the experience of sitting still for ten whole minutes with nothing to do but reflect on the prior week and I found myself thinking about how fortunate I am and how many things for which I have to be grateful.

I find that if you are grateful for what you do have, you don't spend much time thinking about what you don't. Even when things go wrong I am thankful that they weren't worse, because they very easily could have been. And when they are good, I make sure that I take a moment to send up a prayer of thanksgiving to the One who made it all happen.

It Only Takes a Minute

My girlfriend and I were chit-chatting the other day, as we often do, about trying to keep the house clean and organized. There's always so much to do and precious little time to get it all done. "It's amazing," she said to me, "how much you can get done in one minute."

Going on to explain she continued, "I was warming up my coffee in the microwave oven and in the one minute it took to warm it up I was able to tidy up the kitchen a bit. Within that short amount of time the kitchen looked surprisingly better."

This is one of the reasons why I love her so much - girlfriend wisdom - and she is absolutely right. I am a multitasker. There are very few times when I am waiting for something to heat up, or defrost, or start to boil, or whatever that I just stand around and wait for it to do what it's supposed to do. I'm always cleaning something, or putting the dishes away, or cleaning out the fridge. I don't ever just stand there.

So while my house doesn't look like it's straight out of the pages of some organizing magazine, it is normally pretty picked up. Here are some of the tricks that I use to help it along the way.

Make your bed.  Every morning as soon as I get out of bed, I make my bed. Now, while this habit originally started to keep me from climbing back in, it soon became a habit that I liked because it makes my room look neat. It only takes about 45 seconds to make my bed so it's well worth the little bit of time.

Put your clothes away at night.  I am one of those people who doesn't get in my pajamas until I am ready to go to bed. However, when I get home from work I will usually go and change out of my work clothes and into something a little more comfortable. When I do that the clothes that I wear to work either get hung back up or go in the hamper. It's very tempting to just let them lay on the floor, but it takes less than a minute to get everything put away.

Wash your dishes as you cook.  I dislike cooking in a messy kitchen -- there's just too much clutter and then I can't think straight. So when I am cooking I will always have a tub full of soapy water at the ready. Then, as I cook, I can wash items as I go.  Doing this adds no additional time to meal prep and has the added benefit of decreasing my dishwashing time. By the time my meal is done I usually only have one or two items to wash after I eat my dinner. As an added bonus, the soapy water is great for a quick wash-up for messy hands as you cook and you won't have to turn on the tap with dirty hands.

Sort the mail when you bring it inside. Open everything up, put the bills in the bill spot, the coupons in the coupon spot, the newspapers in the newspaper spot, the things you want to look at later in their own spot, and recycle all the rest. Takes less than a minute and your kitchen table will thank you.

The five minute reshuffle. Inevitably things end up in places where they are not supposed to be. You carry this item from one place and leave it in another. I am fortunate that I can have a person come in and clean my house; however, she won't go around and pick up all my clutter. So the night before she cleans I need to spend a few minutes tidying up the place.

My solution: grab one of your re-usable shopping bags and make a quick sweep around the house going through room by room. As you go through each room grab anything that doesn't belong in that room and put it in the bag. With each subsequent room you may be able to grab something out of the bag and put it in it's place within the current room. If you're like me, most things will either need to be returned to the bathroom or the kitchen. One trip through the whole house and in five minutes everything has been returned to it's proper place.

So there you have it -- a few suggestions to help keep our houses a little less cluttered, and it only took a minute.