gratitude.

Recently I have been noticing the difference between feeling grateful and having gratitude in my life.  I do realize that these by definition are entirely synonymous but to me there is something that feels slightly different about the two.  There are a lot of things I am grateful for in my life, having a job, a place to live, roommates that I have a lot of fun with, a car that runs (maybe not very well but hey, life's all about small victories, right?). I guess these are things that I notice everyday but I don't necessarily let myself feel my gratefulness for them. My gratitude. I think that is the difference for me. 

Gratitude evokes something much more in me. 

I love words. Maybe it is because I majored in "putting words together and speaking them out loud", also known as Rhetoric, but I LOVE words. Definitions, origins, antonyms, synonyms, I love it all. I decided to look up other words for the word grateful. I found things like thankful, gratified, indebted, and pleased. Then I looked up synonyms for gratitude. I found some of the same words but also a few more that I think coincide with my feelings towards the topic. They were words like acknowledgement, praise, grace, recognition, honor, responsiveness. 

Mmmmmmm....those are some good words, huh?? 

You are probably wondering what the picture at the top of this post has to do with any of this. I instagrammed this picture today. It is from this past weekend when two of my very best friends visited me from Georgia. I have known Jillian and Erica (not pictured) since my freshman year of high school, actually Erica and I met sometime in middle school....either way, I've been friends with them for what seems like forever. Forever in the best possible way.  I think there is something exceptional about the people that have known you for that long and still choose to fly across the country to visit you for less than 48 hours. There is something special about the ones that know where you come from, the places you have been to where you are now. And when I think of the fact that they still love me and cherish our friendship despite the ways I might have failed them in different areas and at different points in our friendship over the years leaves me with a deep, deep sense of gratitude. I didn't really fully grasp that gratitude until I was staring at this picture this morning and remembering the feeling I had in this moment. With our feet hanging off the edge of a mountain that we had just hiked, laying there with no worries except for how much time we had before the downpour of rain was coming, I felt completely known, completely comfortable, completely content. And those are things I can't say that I feel all the time with just anyone. Gratitude.

One of my favorite bloggers one time wrote, "Here's to gratitude and how it turns everything into enough." Cheers to that!