From the Coffee Table Book: “The Breath I Take”

From the Grateful Peoples Coffee Table Book — real, handwritten gratitude from people all over the country.

Of the 100,000-plus entries strangers have left in these communal journals since 2016, this is one few read quickly. It was written by hand, exactly like this:

“I am grateful for the breath I take each moment, for we never know when it will be our last. Last weekend, I gave CPR to a man for 20 minutes in a cafe on 31st Street. He died later that day. Give love, receive love, and live with gratitude. The rest will come.”

The person who wrote it knelt on a café floor and gave everything they had for twenty minutes to a man they’d never met. It didn’t work. And then, instead of going numb, they sat down and wrote gratitude — not for the outcome, but for the breath. For the fragile, miraculous, easily-forgotten fact of being alive right now.

Grateful Peoples founder Teddy Droseros has often said that remembering we’re going to die is one of the most life-giving things a person can do. When he gets tangled in something small and anxious, he reminds himself that one day his heart will simply stop — and the question becomes obvious: how does he want to spend the time until then? It pulls him straight back into the present, where life is actually happening.

“Give love, receive love, and live with gratitude. The rest will come.” A stranger wrote their whole philosophy in nine words after one of the hardest days of their life. Hard to say it better. That’s the power this practice can hold — not a mood booster, but a way of meeting a life fully.

This entry is one of hundreds in the Grateful Peoples Coffee Table Book — about 250 pages of real handwritten gratitude, available in the shop. Every copy sold helps fund gratitude journals for students in classrooms that asked. For more reflections in this spirit, the writing and community at Grateful.org is a good place to keep going.

No pitch to end on — just an invitation: wherever you are, take one breath on purpose. Feel it come in and go out. None of us knows how many we get. That’s not a reason to be afraid — it’s the reason to be here.