The artist Katsuhiko Satō has written the following poem: “Wondrous, wondrous! To be alive here and breathe and move my hands and think and cry and laugh—what a wondrous life I have been given.” This poem seems to pack as much thankfulness as possible into the word wondrous. We can see that the writer is deeply thankful for being born a human being.
If you really think about it, human life truly is a wondrous thing. We have our parents, who gave us life in this world. We were not born into this world through the efforts of our parents alone, however, but also through an invisible great force. Even that one fact is nothing short of wondrous.
As this poem does, it is important to find and list the wondrous things in your daily life, the things for which you are thankful. You can be thankful that you are living, breathing without having to think about it, feeling concern for others regarding one thing or another, holding each other’s hands, and crying or laughing. All of this is wondrous. So too is the fact that a child’s smiling face can erase the tiredness of a day, the fact that you have work that causes sweat on the brow, the fact that perhaps you can energetically go up and down the train station stairs. These too are things to be thankful for. And the thing you should be the most thankful for is that you have been caused to live.
When you become aware of this wondrousness, even daily life naturally becomes something for which you feel an overflowing gratitude. And it seems that this mind-set of thankfulness is the primary source of happiness.
Kokorono manako o hiraku [Opening the Mind’s Eye] (Kosei Publishing, 2013), pp. 93–94
Nichiko Niwano is president of Rissho Kosei-kai and an honorary president of Religions for Peace. He also serves as an advisor to Shinshuren (Federation of New Religious Organizations of Japan).
