Have you ever had a moment in your life when you are beyond a doubt excited to the point that you feel butterflies in your stomach or feel warmth spread across your body? At that moment in time did you know what to call it? No? Well neither did I. This past summer I learned that that feeling or reaction is a moment in your life when you felt gratitude. When I learned what to call it, my entire outlook on life changed.

“A moment in gratitude makes a difference in your attitude” - Anonymous

During the summer I was a camp counselor for the Girl Scouts, and something we did with our campers that I fell in love with was noticing and sharing gratitude. Throughout the week we would share gratitude with our campers and at the end of each week we would head up to the gratitude tree and share gratitude there by writing our gratitude down on cd’s that would then be hung on the tree for the rest of the summer. By the end of the summer going up to that tree had become quite magical, especially for campers. The wind would rustle the cd’s or the sun would shine just right that it would cast a rainbow across your face. One of my favorite moments of sharing gratitude, was a beautiful sunny day canoeing with my campers. Where we rafted up, which is pulling all the boats together side by side and holding on to them creating a big raft, and we shared gratitude in the middle of the lake with the sun shining on us.

My first time going up to the gratitude tree I hadn’t quite grasped the idea of gratitude or what it truly meant, so it didn’t have quite an impact on me yet. It was just a moment in time where I would sit in silence and think of something I was grateful for. However, as the summer went on and gratitude became more integrated into my life, I started to understand it more and learned to embrace and love it. There would be moments with my campers that either I felt gratitude or they felt gratitude and I witnessed their experience, that I truly saw this job and my life as a blessing.

Learning about gratitude can only get you so far, you have to truly experience something before you can accept it into your life and this is what happened to me. I learned of gratitude during training and then was told to teach it to my campers and embrace it. There was a moment of freak out where I asked myself how I can teach something that I don’t fully understand yet. Well, my coworkers became my heroes, more than that they became some of the greatest people I had ever met. My staff partner helped me express gratitude with my campers and taught me how to ease into it. Before I knew it, I had embraced gratitude with a warm hug and could easily express and teach it to my campers.

“Gratitude is when memory is stored in the heart and not in the mind” - Anonymous

There was a moment this summer, going up to the gratitude tree, I was behind all my campers, that I could hear their awe of seeing the gratitude tree, that I felt an instant of pure joy. At this brief instance I felt gratitude, the first true moment of gratitude and knowing what to call it, that I knew it was going to change my life for the better.

Finding gratitude can be a difficult thing, because life is full of so many twists and turns. However, going down the path towards finding gratitude is different for everybody. For some it comes naturally, and others it takes a while. No matter the path that lies ahead of you, take the step towards integrating gratitude into your life. Once gratitude is part of your life, there will be so much laughter, love and brightness.

So if you ever experience a moment where you feel this immense joy, whether it is butterflies in your stomach, or warmth spreading across your body, you have experienced gratitude. When this moment comes I hope you learn to embrace gratitude and live a happier life with gratitude in it. I know for me it has brought amazing memories, friendships, and more happiness into my life.