I have seen grief at its worse. A friend of mine lost her husband at sea, and the body was never found. She did not know whether to let go or continue to cling to her hope that someday they would meet again. With no body to bury, she hanged onto hope and despair. After three years, she started to realize she would never see her husband again. Her bereavement took a toll on her work, relationships with friends and family. Her family got professional help for her. When her bereavement was over, she got on with her life.

Grief may not always be about the death of a loved one, it may also be the loss of things people value or care for deeply. This is a natural reaction to a loss. Although painful, grief or bereavement is normal and necessary to expunge all the negative feelings associated with loss. People react to a deep loss differently. Others can cry. This is cathartic. But there are others who stoically bear the sorrow of bereavement. It may take months or years before they can come to grips with themselves. There are several reactions to the death of a loved one. They may be shocked or disbelieving, harbor a sense of deep loss, and feel guilt and regret.

Other people are not aware that bereavement may prod feelings of injustice, envy, anger, and relief. They nurture this nagging suspicion that they should not feel this way. When others wallow in loneliness and depression this is also normal. The process of grief does not follow a formula. Some may need professional help, and others may get back on with their routines in a snap.

Bereavement is also painful for children and adolescents. Very young children may understand the extent of the loss but they feel the pain as much as adults do. They may not share their grief, for they see that the adults are grieving. Sometimes when young adolescents feel they are to blame for the death of a loved one. This can do great harm to the mind of a young child.

It is advisable to get professional help when someone cannot get over bereavement. The family doctor can provide medical prescription for help people going into depressions. Some can get also get help from religious or voluntary organizations. Others may have to see a psychotherapist or a bereavement counselor.

Before you see where this article is heading, maybe you would like to take a short quiz on Harry Potter.

To all Harry Potter’s fans and foes out there, please give your best shot at answering the following question. What would you call Harry Potter’s grandfather? Any success yet, no? Come on, surely you can think harder than that? You’ve read it at least three times in the books before! Ok, here’s the answer, Harry Potter’s grandpa is’ Mr Potter!

Isn’t it funny? I apologize if the answer has left any unforeseen mental traumas or bodily bruises from falling off the seats. But the question that I really want to ask is more important than Harry Potter’s ancestry. The question is: what were you doing, when you were reading the joke?

Were you glancing through the words to get the answer straight away, just like what the other 90% of the people did and react with indifference? Or did you contemplate about the answer while looking for it, and welcome it with a smile or a look of disbelief? Truth be told, as long as you smile or jest at the joke, you are showing appreciation for the joke, you are showing gratitude for it. Do you want to know why?

Because you are living in the moment, that’s why. You are paying attention to life’s mini surprises and you are showing gratitude for them by responding accordingly. Only by ‘living in the moment’, you can find yourself giving the most sincere gratitude. In fact, showing gratitude should be a way of life!

‘So, if I am still alive and kicking, doesn’t it mean I’m living in the moment?’ And thus you are showing gratitude 24/7? Nope, most people never did live in the moment. A Zen parable illustrates this point perfectly:

Young Monk: Master, how do I practise The Way?
Old Master: When hungry, eat; when tired, sleep.
Young monk: Is it not what most people do?
Old Master: (Shaking his head in disapproval) No, no, no. Most people are not like this. Most people, when eating, are full of thoughts and desire, and when sleeping, are full of cares.
-AsiaPac, The book of Zen

Attention deficit is no longer an ingrained disorder; it can be picked up and learnt as we follow the pace of the society, the result is what the parable mentioned; core activities such as eating and sleeping are now congruent with the TV or work desk. One can’t help but wonder, is it really vital to work while eating? Multitasking is meant for tasks only, if eating has become a ‘task’ for you, you have lost a gift, the gift of appreciation and showing gratitude for the simple things in life.

It would be pointless if I had told you a step-by-step process for showing gratitude or living in the moment. I strongly believe in the maxim that; when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Once you understood the significance of bringing gratitude into your life, you will have no problems understanding gratitude itself.

I’ll end with a quote, ‘Yesterday is gone, that’s why it is called the past. Tomorrow never comes, that’s why it’s called the future. Today is a gift, and that’s why it’s called the present’

Truly I tell you, gratitude is the key to abundance. For if you are grateful, surely you will experience an increase in all the good things you feel you are deserving in Life.

Gratitude does not come from a “this is too good to be true” feeling. Nor does it come from feelings of lack and desperation, such that you are dependent upon external factors as if the world owes you anything. Gratitude comes from a realisation, a proper understanding of things, that goes as deep and as true as that of a mother’s love for her child.

Thankfulness cannot be faked or forced. You can train a child to say “Thank You” when he is given something good, but you cannot cause him to truly experience deep feelings of gratitude and appreciation in his heart.

Perhaps this is why grateful people have always been in short supply. I am referring to the truly grateful, not the masses that only profess gratefulness by the tongue but do not possess it in the depths of their hearts. However, like any other tendencies, true gratefulness can be slowly and steadily instilled in one’s being by consistent and diligent observation and practice.

How does abundance come into the picture of gratitude?

To give a weird but vivid analogy, imagine a person living in a dark, claustrophobic and almost airtight pod. Let’s say, for the sake of this analogy, she is able to live solely on air. Her only supply of air streams in from tiny almost imperceptible holes puncturing the surface of the pod. These holes also happen to bring in a little light into her pod.

Abundance is the virtually infinite supply of air that exists as a plenum outside her pod.

Gratitude is the hole that punctures the pod, allowing some air and some light to enter it.

As she lives and breathes in the pod, she is able to notice the tiny holes that have been sustaining her throughout her life. As she has been paying attention to only a fixed area of tiny holes, she thinks those are the only holes that exist to nourish her with much needed air, when in truth, tiny holes dot the entire surface area of the pod.

Every day, she lives a life of struggle, constantly panting and heaving and gasping for air, punctuated only occasionally when she musters the courage and effort to place herself close to an area of holes and really suck in the air from outside the pod.

Let’s say she is not likely to suffer from asphyxiation because she is able to survive on very minimal amounts of air.

One day, she experiences a breakthrough. During one of those rare moments in which she gets the strength to really suck in air from one of the holes on the pod, she notices that her suction had caused the hole to expand in size, thus, the amount of air that streams in increases.

At first, she ignores this phenomenon. But when the effect happens for a second, and a third time, she sets out to turn her hypothesis into a fact. Soon she discovers that there are actually more holes dotting the surface of the pod than she had realised, because of the increased amount of light that enters due to the increasing size of the hole. So she experiments with the other holes dotting the pod, sucking in the outside air with all her might, until eventually, she has a couple of big holes on her pod that bring in really huge amounts of air and light.

Day by day, she continues this new hole-expanding effort of hers. One day, because of the increasing sizes of the holes and the number of holes that have expanded, the structural integrity of the once solid pod diminishes, and she finds that she can easily, almost effortlessly, rip apart the pod as if it were made of paper – hence, finally liberating herself and transcending into a whole new world of abundance.

Bizarre as this analogy might seem, most of us live like the girl in the pod. There are tiny streams of abundance entering our self-imposed imprisoned life. All it takes is our awareness of these sources of sustenance and abundance and to expand our awareness of them, thus increasing our prosperity in all areas of Life.

Everything is an asset. Are you sitting on them or are you finding ways and means of fashioning those assets into materials that you would use to design the life of your dreams?