Gratitude

I know a good way to handle your stress (and your life in general) is to practice gratitude. As with many other things I’ve learned in the past, I didn’t quite get why. The obvious way is to pause for a bit and “count your blessings”. And then after a couple of months, it is easy to forget to do it.

Today I was commuting, a “long” commute (40 minutes instead of the 12 my train usually takes). The train was passing through a semi-abandoned construction site, the kind that has piles of dirt and nothing much else, and I noticed it was covered in beautiful flowers from the spring—the whole slope, maybe 20 meters, nicely decorated with tiny white flowers.

It has been a year since I moved to the Netherlands. The surprise element of seeing something for the first time is diminishing, but this sighting reminded me how fortunate I am to live here, to be in a place where the flowers appear like this, that my commute is not that long, and all the other many little things I have.