Kristi Nelson is the director of A Network for Grateful Living, founded by Benedictine Brother David Steindl-Rast and friends. She shares her own story of learning to embrace gratitude as a way of life:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n At 33 years old, I was diagnosed with stage IV Hodgkin\u2019s lymphoma that had metastasized to my spine. After going through 18 months of hospitalizations, surgeries, chemotherapy, and treatments, I asked my oncologist, \u201cWhen will I be out of the woods?\u201d He answered, \u201cYou will never be out of the woods.\u201d Having worked so hard to stay alive, I had not grasped the degree of uncertainty and struggle that would come with being a survivor. Understanding that my life would only ever be lived with the caveat of \u201cfor now\u201d was sobering. I wondered so many things: How do I continue to live this way? What am I able to count on? . . . How do I live while expecting to die?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first few years of uncertainty and remission put the blessings of my life in sharp relief. I was in super-soak <\/em>mode\u2014every experience was saturated with new meaning, and I was absorbing it all fully. I did not know any other way to live the moments I had than to greet each one as gratefully as I could. Not sure how much more time was mine, I was awestruck by every moment, every person, and every thing. Being grateful the first few years was relatively easy and revelatory. I would wake up in a room bathed in light, hear birds singing, and notice I was still breathing. . . . I could put both feet on the floor and walk freely to a kitchen where I could make a cup of tea. It was enough to make me start each day with tears of joy. Being alive was enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perhaps like many of us, as her health stabilized, Nelson became \u201cimmune\u201d to spontaneous daily gratitude:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n But over time, all those amazing reasons to feel grateful joined the ranks of the taken-for-granted. I got healthy and busy. I began chasing goals and the fulfillment they promised. I martyred myself to a job, complained about things like traffic, my weight, and colds. I ruthlessly compared myself to others, succumbed to retail therapy and debt, and suffered from stress. Each year that passed, I built up a kind of gratitude tolerance\u2014what used to be enough got left in the dust in the pursuit of having more. Having cheated death, I began cheating life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After some challenging years, dramatic wake-up calls, and my share of spiritual suffering, I came to realize that maintaining a grateful perspective is a true practice. . . . This capacity for grateful perspective is a muscle I needed to build and use, and it is still something I need to nurture and tend daily. . . . The practice of looking at the world through grateful eyes and with a grateful heart is an exquisite end in itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Kristi Nelson, Wake Up Grateful: The Transformative Practice of Taking Nothing for Granted <\/em>(North Adams, MA: Storey Publishing, 2020), 1\u20132, 3.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Gratitude is a Practice\u00a0\u00a0 Kristi Nelson is the director of A Network for Grateful Living, founded by Benedictine Brother David Steindl-Rast and friends. She shares her own story of learning to embrace gratitude as a way of life: At 33 years old, I was diagnosed with stage IV Hodgkin\u2019s lymphoma that had metastasized to my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=327"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":328,"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327\/revisions\/328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}