Thanksgiving Every Day: Being Grateful For Today

Why does Thanksgiving only come once a year? In this episode, Mark Yuzuik talks about why Thanksgiving should be celebrated daily, recognizing your assets and being grateful and thankful for every day. When everything seems to be going against you, always remember that everything has a purpose and reason. Mark shares a story of pain and suffering and how a simple act of kindness and understanding saved the person. Mark also gives his thoughts on the pain and discomfort you’re having and how this corresponds to your growth as an individual.

—

Listen to the podcast here:

Thanksgiving Every Day: Being Grateful For Today

I started thinking about all the things that we could be thankful for, should be thankful for, and maybe we need to be thankful and grateful for. What gets me is why do we have to only celebrate Thanksgiving one day a year? Why can’t it be every day? Why can’t we wake up in the morning and say, “I wonder what I’m thankful for today.” Even the things that appear to be that, “Life isn’t working for me. Everything’s against me. I don’t feel right.” If you don’t feel right, then condition your body to get excited when you wake up. Condition your mind that no matter what happens, there’s a reason and a purpose for it and be grateful and thankful for everything. The only reason you have any pain or discomfort is because you need to learn a lesson. There’s a part of your life getting ready to grow. I think that’s the most important thing. Not that we’d all have ups and downs every day, it’s life, but it’s how you handle it.

My wife turns on a video and watching funny videos and enjoying it. Up pops the Mel Robbins’ video of a lady that had a pretty rough childhood and they were talking about drug addictions to opium and prescription drugs. How it affects the people in America and who’s affected the most? How do we handle this stuff? I remember them interviewing this one lady and it was an African-American lady. She had said that she started on prescription drugs when she was twelve years old. Obviously, you could figure out what happened to her. All she wanted to do was to start off numbing the pain because she wasn’t allowed to talk about things.

Some of you feel the same way. You feel like you can’t talk about it. You’re ashamed or you did something wrong or whatever it was. The reaction is how do we respond to it? The only thing we want to do as a human being is getting rid of the pain. She got to where she was taking 800 milligrams of Hydrocodone. It was crazy. At eleven years old, she took three of them. How she made it through life and didn’t pass away. Imagine, eleven years old having to numb yourself because of that. She was smart enough to say, “I know pills get rid of pain,” but not understanding why or what.

She just wanted to get rid of the pain. She went through and had some addictions. Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying she was smarter. What her brain decided to do was, “How do I get out of this pain?” Maybe those pills, as bad as they were for her, saved her life because what would she have done if she had dealt with the pain. What road would she have gone down? We don’t know. We can only speculate. When I say smart enough to say that, I don’t mean that in that encouraging way I recommend that you do that. What I’m saying is our brains are designed for survival. For whatever happened, whatever reason, whatever it was that guided her to take those pills, that was a horrible thing that it even had to happen.

When it's not your time, and you still have a purpose in life, you will find a way to survive. Share on X

That was the only way she could stay alive maybe. We don’t know. I’m not her. I don’t know the situation, but I do know that we are designed for survival. As she went on with her life, she got pregnant at fourteen and her life was about getting into drugs. She decided one time she was going to take every possible drug in one night. Oxycodone, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, you name it. She crunched all up and took it. She woke up on the side and she should have been dead. For whatever reason, she lived. Isn’t that amazing? When it’s not your time, then you still have a purpose in life that you will find a way to survive. She was telling the story about how one day, she had enough. She was outside of a strip club, which is where she worked.

She had all the drugs in her car and she had a gun. She called a family member and she said, “Give me a reason why I should live.” Her family members said, “I will call you back in twenty minutes.” She called a friend and the friend stayed on the line. Within a few minutes, every emergency vehicle you could think of surrounded her. The police, the fire department, the paramedics, the drug and alcohol. You name it, they came there. She had the gun in her mouth. The reason I’m telling this story is because when you think of being thankful, she has something to be thankful for to this day. I want to tell you the reason why.

I remember the police officer knocking on her car door and saying, “You don’t have to roll down the window, just crack it so I could talk to you.” She did. She cracked it. He says, “I want to assure you one thing. I’m not here to arrest you.” The police officer knew that if he had arrested her, the only thing this was going to do is cause more pain. She had every drug possible. She said she should have been put in jail for all of the drugs in her car, let alone the gun and everything else. The police officer said, “Why don’t we do this? I promise you, you put the gun down and I’ll get you help. I will not arrest you.” That’s a cop, a police officer, a peace officer that got it because, in life, servicemen and women are there to serve us.

It wasn’t about a power trip. It wasn’t about being what was legal or what wasn’t legal. It was about that girl’s life, that human being’s life. It didn’t matter who she was, what religion she was, what politics she believed in, what race she was, or what she looked like. All it mattered was that was a human being that needed somebody to be there. An angel. I believe that cop showed up for a reason on purpose for a purpose. All the other professionals around there, the fire department, the paramedics, the ambulance. There were several others around there. This is what blew my mind because I’ve never heard anything like this before. What they did was they all gathered around her car and they held hands and prayed for her.

Grateful For Today: Condition your mind that no matter what happens, there’s a reason and a purpose for it.

I’m not here to tell you that be religious and all that. The message that she got at that moment was people cared and loved me more than I ever loved myself because I didn’t feel like I deserved love. What a powerful message that is. She took the gun out of her mouth and they got her out of the car and they did not put her in handcuffs. As he promised, he did not arrest her. He didn’t shame her. He took her to a facility where she can get clean and sober. It was a ten-day facility. In ten days, they were done with the treatment and they were out. She told them in the facility, “At the end of ten days, I’m still homeless. What do I do?” They wound up keeping her there for 30 days.

Everything paid for and taken care of. They cared for her as a human being. This is a group of people. There’s always bad and good in the world. What if you said, “How can we be thankful for the people out there that are there for us for a reason?” They’re police officers because they care. They’re fire department because they care. They’re ambulance because they care. People at 911 are there because they care. They are there for one reason. Their purpose isn’t to make a lot of money. It’s to serve. That’s why they call them services. They’re there to serve. The military is a great service, isn’t it? They’re there to serve us. At the end of 30 days, she got her act together.

They made sure she was strong. Mel Robbins said, “How long has it been? How long have you been clean and sober?” She said, “I’ve been clean and sober for eight years. What I was going to do, I was going to end my life. All I needed was a reason.” Sometimes you are the angel that people need, and maybe you need an angel. Ask yourself one thing. What can you be grateful and thankful for? Why does it have to be every day? Maybe Thanksgiving is there for us to be thankful and to be appreciative of what we are every day of the year. What if we made Thanksgiving a daily routine and focused on that? Where would your life be? Who would you be serving? How would you grow? Who would you be influencing?

In life, that’s what we have. We have to have a purpose in life. If we don’t have a purpose or we don’t live up to our purpose, then we’re going to suffer. We’re going to have pain because we’re going to be confused and we’ll never be fulfilled. I wonder what you could be thankful for. If you were to stop and say, “I don’t have anything to be thankful for.” What if you have so many things to be thankful for and you counted your assets and your blessings instead of your liabilities? You focus on, “I have debt and I don’t have a new condo.” I have all these things then you’re focused not on your assets, but your liabilities. What if you said, “I may not have all those things. I may not have a lot of money. I may not have a lot of anything, but what I do have is I can listen, walk, speak, and think. I can communicate, serve, and help others. I can be there.”

Sometimes you're the angel that people need. Share on X

You start appreciating and then all the assets that you have in life are way more abundant than the liabilities. If you’re not appreciative and thankful for them, then how do you recognize them? How do you find them? If you don’t know what you’re looking for, how are you going to find it? If you want to find something and ask yourself, “Who am I? What am I here for? What can I do? How can I serve? How can I be a service to other people as well as myself?” When I say service to other people, that means serve yourself too. Here’s what was beautiful about the story about this lady is everybody else loved her more than she loved herself because we could only love ourselves based on what we feel we deserve.

Sometimes things that happen to us in our past were so innocent and young that were violated and we don’t feel we deserve it. Not that we don’t, but our brain will play tricks on us. If you allow that story to create the meaning for you, then what’s going to happen is you’re going to keep reliving that story and you’re never going to feel like you can grow. Remember, your brain is designed for survival. It’s not designed to make you happy or successful. The brain designed for survival. It’s up to us to say, “How do we change that? How can we turn something that is negative, all that pain, into something positive?” It’s about service. How can we serve others? Those people that surrounded that car and held hands were there for a purpose, to serve. Not to put her in jail, not to say, “We took another drug person off the streets. She was horrible.”

You don’t know somebody’s story. Sometimes people do things out of pain because they don’t feel love. They don’t feel like they love themselves enough. If somebody else can love them for a moment, sometimes it takes a moment, a person, a heart, somebody that cares. When you have that moment that you can share for the rest of her life, she never made one bad mistake and pulled that trigger. That police officer, that peace officer, for the rest of his life served his purpose. He was guided for whatever reason to be there, to choose that profession. I believe when people choose that profession, not to control, but to allow people to become more on purpose for themselves and to service them. At that point, you have a great team out there.

If you think about all the people we have in this world, here in the US, Canada, wherever you are, they’re there to serve. Instead of bashing people and judging them for their thoughts and their beliefs, what if we didn’t judge them and we accepted them? We understood why some people make decisions based on their pain, as well as their pleasure. I wonder what that would be like. I wonder if we didn’t judge anybody all day and we listened to them. Maybe that’s all they need. Maybe that’s all it was, one simple line. One simple thing you could say to somebody that says, “You care about them,” because maybe they need somebody to care for them more than they care about themselves. They need that. That’s your sole purpose for the day. I wonder what you could do to influence, inspire, and to put a smile on somebody’s face and then reward yourself and be thankful for that gesture. Not looking for anything in return, but be thankful and grateful and say, “I made somebody’s day.”

Grateful For Today: The only reason you have any pain or discomfort is because you need to learn a lesson. There’s a part of your life getting ready to grow.

When you give somebody a gift and they’re all excited and they’re jumping up and down. Whether it’s an adult and child, a family member, a stranger, and they’re all excited. How does that make you feel? Who got the gifts? They got the present, but you get the gift. They get to cherish what you gave to them, but you both get to cherish the gift. If you got them a gift and they go, “I don’t want this gift. What’s wrong with you? Get that away from me,” before they even opened it. How would that make you feel? When you don’t give somebody something or meaning that you don’t accept their gift, in order to be a giver, you have to be able to receive. When you don’t allow that to happen and you judge people, “That person is a drug addict. They’re mean. They do this,” then you’re not listening to what they need in life.

It’s time to give a gift. I wonder what gift you can give. You don’t have to buy it. It could be a service. It can be anything. It can be being there in a hospital for somebody that needs a smile. It could be a stranger. Imagine not getting caught doing something nice. How good would it make you feel? I have a friend that says, “Go out there and do something for somebody. Do something nice for somebody and don’t get caught.” I thought, “That’s cool.” You’re not doing it for ego. You’re doing it for service. I think our whole life and what we can be thankful for is the service that we can provide to others and what we’ll receive in return is fulfillment. Make a difference in somebody else’s life. What could you be thankful for every day? Not just Thanksgiving Day, but every day, what could you be thankful for?

How can you serve? How can you make a difference in somebody else’s life and also make a difference in your life? If you live on purpose and you live for the purpose and the intentions of caring, loving, and uplifting others, your life will be fulfilled and you’ll be successful. I want to thank you very much and like I say, I’m grateful for this. I remember getting an email and saying, “You need to do more shows.” That’s a wake-up call for me. Maybe I have something to share out there. Maybe I want to give my opinion on certain things. It’s just an opinion. It’s not right or wrong. I’m asking you to agree or disagree. You have opinions too.

What makes this world beautiful is to share your opinions, share your experiences. Don’t complain about them. Share them. From there, you don’t know who’s listening and who needs to listen. Create the energy that you want every day so you can be grateful and thankful. Subscribe to my show so you can get notified. Go to my website, GetYourMindSetWithMark.com. Get my free book, Creating the Life You Want. Read a chapter a day and keep the poverty away. I’m going to continue doing these shows and you go out there and be thankful and grateful. I’m thankful that you’re reading this and thankful for my life. Until the next episode, God bless you and have an awesome day.