WORKS for me--Wednesday!

I couldn't resist! Shannon, from, Rocks in my Dryer, has started a really cool Wednesday challenge. "Works for me Wednesday" is an opportunity to share helpful tips on short-cuts, helpful tools or aides that you have discovered that make your life easier! While this post does not entail helpful hints about housekeeping (you'll never see that here!), organizational tools (nope, not goin' there either) or secrets about raising happy and healthy children (if I KNEW that, I'd write a best-seller!), nevertheless, I just can't resist participating!

Today is a red letter day at our house! Red letter day? One of great commemoration! One to mark on my calendar with neon R.E.D. letters--flashing if I could find such a pen! I'll try to curb my enthusiasm--but here goes.

Works for me!

Our daughter will graduate from college on May 13th! Woo-hoo! After submitting more than 20 applications to nearby hospitals and Care Centers, after waiting for months to even hear back from any of them, after a bit of confusion--after all, isn't there a shortage of Nurses around the country (???), she has been hired as a RN in the Neo-natal center of St. John's Hopsital; exactly the area of care she specialized in! Double woo-hoo! Her husband, my most-favorite son-in-law, has been hired full-time following his internship with an accounting firm in Bloomington. AND our son, of course, is happily working at the Happiest Place on Earth--Disney World.

Now in case any of you missed why this WORKS for me this sunny Wednesday in Minnesota--let me just share! This is gonna work just fine! This is the first time in oh-so-many-years that my husband and I can really breathe, yes, the deep-reach-your-belly-cleansing-breathes! Our daughter, our son-in-law, and our adult first born son--are gainfully employed! Yup--that works for us!

The deeper work of this is simple: gratitude. While we are not guaranteed an easy passage on this journey, it does seem to make the road easier when we focus on gratitude. It seems whenever I face a bump in the road, my focus becomes narrow and I zero in on the problem. Rarely do I lift my head up from the problem and look around; or even within!~ In recent years, I have challenged myself to lift my eyes up and broaden my horizon. To my surprise (duh!), I have experienced gratitude! Even in the deepest, darkest hours of anxiety, I have found gratitude. Others have written about gratitude:

Anthony Robbins: "When you are grateful fear disappears and abundance appears."
Lionel Hampton: "Gratitude is when memory is stored in the heart and not in the mind."
Eileen Caddy: "Gratitude helps you to grow and expand; gratitude brings joy and
laughter into your life and into the lives of all those around you."
John Henry Jowett: "Gratitude is a vaccine, an antitoxin, and an antiseptic."
And Dennis Prager reminds us that there is always room for gratitude: "Given the amount of unjust suffering and unhappiness in the world, I am deeply grateful for, sometimes perplexed by, how much misery I have been spared."

So, while there may be unknown troubles looming, what works for me is gratitude! An anonymous author sums it up for me each day: "Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow."

Gratitude: Works for me!