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Good morning next chapter family. I am Kwame and this is your morning step. Most people think that gratitude is a feeling, something that arrives when good things happen. You get a clean bill of health, you feel grateful. Your grandchild calls out of the blue, you feel grateful. The check clears, you feel grateful. But what about the mornings when nothing remarkable happens? When the news is bad, the body aches, and the phone doesn't ring. Is gratitude only for the good days? The Benedictine monk, Brother David Standel Rast, has spent decades studying this question. And he put it this way it is not happiness that makes us grateful. It is gratefulness that makes us happy. Now let me tell you why this landed differently for me this morning. He's essentially flipping the whole thing around. We think the sequence is something good happens, then we feel grateful, then we feel happy. But Steindel Rost says it works in reverse. You practice gratefulness first, even when things are imperfect, and the happiness follows. Not because your circumstances changed, because your attention changed. Gratitude is not a reaction, it is a muscle, and like any muscle, it gets stronger with use. The person who practices gratitude on the ordinary Tuesday is building something that will carry them through the hardest Thursday of their life. Because when the crisis comes, the muscle is already there. You don't need a reason to be grateful this morning, you just need to flex the muscle. So here's your small step for today. Start a gratitude practice today. It doesn't have to be fancy. A note on your phone, a line in a journal, a sentence spoken out loud. Write down one thing you are grateful for this morning. Do it again tomorrow. That's how the muscle grows. Now, before I wrap up, let me share a personal story with you. I have been doing a gratitude journal practice in and out over the last probably five years, and I gave it up for a little bit, maybe for a whole year, because I was in my head about a lot of things, and I picked it back up again a couple of months ago, and I have to tell you, it has changed my mornings, it has changed how I approach my day because when I write down what I'm grateful for the previous day, and I do that continuously when the bad times come, when the hard days come, when the difficult seasons arrive, and I'm struggling to feel grateful for anything, I just go to my journal and then I just look at all the things that have happened the last month, two months, three months that I'm grateful for, and that brings perspective, that brings grounding, and that has helped me navigate so many tough seasons because there is always something to be grateful for, and because I do this as a practice, even on the bad days, I sit myself down and I'm able to identify something the previous day to be grateful for. So this is something that I do, and I know it's going to be helpful to you. So to wrap up, as always, this is your next chapter. Write it well, and I'll see you tomorrow.