A Moment’s Pause for Gratitude: Enrich Your Life with a Focus on Gratitude

By Kevin Carroll

“Kevin Carroll's reminders have helped me resist the urge to complain and replace it with an appreciation of all that I have. A Moment’s Pause for Gratitude can be read in one sitting or used as a daily prayer of thanks; either way, it serves as an antidote to negativity and an aide for the peaceful mind. I expect it will be as helpful to other readers as it has been for me and I’m grateful to him for putting it into this world.”

­­­—Roland Merullo
Author, Breakfast with Buddha and The Delight of Being Ordinary

We all feel grateful from time to time, yet how often do we fail to adequately express our gratitude to others? The fifty inspirational stories contained in A Moment’s Pause for Gratitude will inspire readers to focus on gratitude and to express their gratitude more consistently and conscientiously.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Oct 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781504390101

Kevin Carroll

KEVIN CARROLL is a native of San Francisco. He is a graduate of both Santa Clara University and the University of San Francisco. He has lived in the Santa Clara Valley for more than fifty years. Carroll is the author of A Moment’s Pause for Gratitude (Balboa Press, 2017)

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 KEVIN CARROLL.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Balboa Press

A Division of Hay House

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.balboapress.com

1 [phone]

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

ISBN: 978-1-5043-9009-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-9010-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017915965

Balboa Press rev. date: 02/23/2018

For my mother,

Peg Carroll,

with gratitude for her

unconditional love

which has consistently nourished me

throughout my lifetime.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1     It’s Time!

2     The Gift of Education

3     The Gift of Challenging Times

4     Lifelong Learning

5     The Gift of Solitude

6     It Happens Sometimes

7     Inappropriate Language

8     The Challenge of Gratitude

9     Excess Baggage

10   Mistakes

11   Living Simply

12   Why Work So Hard?

13   A Time to Surrender

14   Life Isn’t Fair

15   On Doing Nothing

16   Learning to Say No

17   Learning from Social Cruelty

18   What’s In Your Wallet?

19   Responsible Parenting

20   A Year to Remember

21   Play Ball!

22   38th Avenue

23   Wisdom from Other Cultures

24   Simple Gratitude

25   The Gift of Typing

26   Making Wishes

27   The Gift of Brokenness

28   Recapturing Childhood Innocence

29   It’s All About Attitude

30   Santa Cruz Lighthouse

31   Carpe Diem

32   An Embarrassing Moment

33   Coping with Change

34   A Matter of Perspective

35   Experiencing God in the Ordinary

36   The Gift of Visualization

37   A Commitment to Excellence

38   Sprezzatura

39   Friendships

40   A Lifetime of Writing

41   Cultural Diversity

42   There, but for the Grace of God…

43   Losing My Dad

44   Goin’ Out to Play

45   Being There Totally

46   The Shadow of Grief

47   It’s All Good

48   Kids Say the Darnedest Things

49   Eight O’Clock

50   Just Let It Go

Conclusion

About The Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

No act of kindness is ever wasted.

~ Aesop

Very rarely in life does anyone accomplish anything by him/herself. More often than not, our success comes as a result of the help and guidance we receive from any number of sources. The publication of A Moment’s Pause for Gratitude is no different.

As I will mention in the Introduction of this book, my journey of gratitude began at the Jesuit Retreat Center in Los Altos, California in November 2006. I am grateful for the retreat facilitators and retreat center staff who made that weekend such a life-changing experience for me.

I would like to thank Roland Merullo, Hal Urban, and Don McPhail, three accomplished authors, who provided encouragement, inspiration, and guidance to me throughout the process of writing this book.

I would also like to thank Fr. Richard Hilliard, a longtime friend and a priest of the Catholic Diocese of San José, California, for his constant support and encouragement.

I am especially grateful to my family — to my three sons, Tom, Steve, and Brendan, for their unending love and support, and for their willingness to allow me to share some of their life experiences, many of which have been sources of gratitude in my life, and to my wife, Kathy, for her enduring love, encouragement, and patience. I’d also like to express my gratitude to Kathy for the countless times she has challenged me to be a better writer, a better parent, and a better person.

Finally, I would like to thank my mother, Peg Carroll, to whom this book is dedicated. For more than ten years, Mom has read, printed, and often shared my blog posts with others. The unconditional love she has provided throughout my lifetime is, and will always be, a tremendous source of gratitude for me.

And as my Dad would have said, Thanks be to God.

INTRODUCTION

Parent: What do you say?

Child: Thank you!

One of the first lessons we learn in early childhood is one of life’s most important: Gratitude. Learning to be grateful, and learning to express our gratitude to others, is more than just a basic social skill. It lays the foundation upon which we can live a happy and fulfilling life. William Arthur Ward may have said it best when he wrote, Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it. Yet how many of us fail to adequately let others know how grateful we are for the ways they enrich our lives?

It’s so easy to take people for granted. Similarly, it is quite easy for us to take for granted the many experiences, opportunities, and abilities with which we have been blessed. How often do we pause in gratitude for the gift of our eyesight, our ability to walk, or for the educational opportunities we’ve had in our lifetime? How often are we consciously grateful for the love of our parents, family members, and friends?

In November 2006, I had the opportunity to participate in a weekend retreat at the Jesuit Retreat Center in Los Altos, California. The focus of the retreat was gratitude. I don’t recall anything specific about the weekend other than the drive down the hill from the retreat center at the conclusion of the retreat on Sunday afternoon. I was absolutely overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude for the people who had enriched my life, for the opportunities I’d experienced, and, yes, even for my ability to see, hear, smell, touch, and taste. I wondered, at that moment, how I might maintain the sense of gratitude I was experiencing. I didn’t have an answer at the time.

I returned to my work as a high school teacher the next day. We were approaching the end of the first semester, with exams just a week or two away. Not surprisingly, my focus shifted from gratitude to the responsibilities of my job. It wasn’t until exams had ended and our Christmas break had begun that I revisited the question about maintaining a focus on gratitude. At that point, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. On December 23rd, I created a blog.

I have always enjoyed writing. Throughout my life, I’ve experienced writing to be quite therapeutic for me. So the idea of beginning a blog about gratitude just made sense. I called it Attitude of Gratitude. For a little more than a year, from December 23, 2006 to January 1, 2008, I wrote and posted an entry every day. In the years since that time, I’ve written consistently, but less frequently. At the beginning of 2017, I took a month off from writing in order to review all the posts I’d written in the past ten years — approximately 1,500 in all. I deleted more than fifty entries, those which, in my opinion, were inconsistent with my theme of gratitude.

The book in your hands contains fifty posts from this blog. My hope is that, by sharing these stories with you, you will develop a greater appreciation for the benefits of living your life with a genuine attitude of gratitude. I also hope to inspire you to be more aware of the people, experiences, opportunities, and possessions in your own life for which you might be grateful. Finally, I hope to motivate you to express your gratitude, freely and frequently, to those responsible for the gifts with which you’ve been blessed.

Each chapter contains two or more reflection questions. If you find them to be helpful for you, please take some time to consider your responses. Fear not! There is no final exam at the end of this book.

It’s been said many times that life is a journey. I invite and encourage you to enrich your journey with a focus on gratitude.

1

It’s Time!

"It is hard to fail, but it is worse

never to have tried to succeed."

~ Theodore Roosevelt

A few things have happened recently which I simply cannot ignore — experiences which finally pushed me off my chair of complacency. The first was seeing the quote above by President Theodore Roosevelt, which I happened to see posted on a friend’s Facebook page. Throughout my life, I have had a fear of failure. For this reason, there were a few opportunities I missed out on. It took me a long time to realize that the word fail is an acronym: First Attempt In Lear ning .

Another nudge came from