As my favorite holiday of the year, Thanksgiving, approaches (at least for those of us in the US), we’re surrounded by messages about gratitude.

Of course, gratitude for our good health, family and friends, our faith and religious community, and our jobs and hobbies are the usual suspects.

And there is much to be grateful for, including for me, wonderful memories of large family gatherings on this holiday over the years.

But, for some of us, there are also seasons of our lives where gratitude might feel out of reach and the only thing we can feel grateful for is being able to endure and keep ourselves going day after day.

Don't underestimate how much that means and how powerful that is, simply being able to do the best we can in some hard seasons of our lives.

Gratitude is a foundational attitude of mindfulness and it highlights, it signals, what means the most to us.

And that can help us stay steady in a world that so often rewards the temporal and shallow.