Be grateful (Ευγνωμων γινου)

What are you grateful for?

I'm grateful for a lot of things, but I also forget a lot of things I should be grateful for. I'm grateful for my health, my mental health, my youth, my strong opinions, my girlfriend, my home, my financial security besides being jobless at the moment but I'm also grateful for living in a country where I have the right to speak my mind, where being a woman is not a major hurdle in life, where being gay is not a major hurdle in life. I'm grateful for never going hungry, never forcibly going without sleep, for having clean drinking water, for the ability to take a vacation, for all the people I call friends, for the Gods who influence my life. I am grateful for religion and good movies. I'm grateful for my ability to sing and write. I'm grateful for enough things to fill a couple of pages, so I'll stop here.

Being grateful should be an active practice, not a passive one. I can be grateful to my girlfriend all I want, but if I don't tell her and show her how grateful I am of our relationship, she'll eventually leave me. If I don;'t reciprocate all she puts into our relationship, she will stop putting energy into our relationship and it will end.

This is exactly what will happen with my relationship to the Gods. If I don't acknowledge what They do for me, if I don't offer to them in return, if I don't perform the rituals, They will leave me be.

I think this is the main focus of this Delphic Maxim and it's a very, very important lesson.