Leading up to Thanksgiving, each day I will blog about what I’m doing to be more grateful. I invite you to join me, and to share your thoughts, observations, suggestions and ideas.
Day 10: Instead of regretting the past, being grateful for the present
This week I’m blogging about the reasons I’m not as grateful as I know I should be — I kicked off the series of gratitude stoppers here.
Besides spending energy wanting what I don’t have, and being frustrated by life’s annoyances, another thing that distracts me from gratitude is regret.
With the benefit of hindsight, my life is peppered with events I wish I could do over. Mostly they’re times when I haven’t treated people as well as they deserved.
It’s easy for me to invest a lot of time turning those events over and over in my mind and beating myself up for them. I would like to reclaim some of that time and energy to redirect it into gratitude.
Does that mean giving myself a pass for the mistakes I’ve made? Absolutely not.
Instead, I’m looking for ways to learn from those experiences:

• think about why I made the choices I did
• think about what I’d do differently if I had the chance
• apologize to those I’ve hurt

And yes, I’d even like to be grateful for those regretable memories. Because as long as I’m paying attention, maybe I learned something that will help me become more of the person I’d like to be.
Sort of like touching a hot stove helps you learn that it’s a bad idea to touch a hot stove.
Can you give thanks for mistakes you’ve made in the past and lessons you learned as a result?