Give gratitude, the voice inside my head said very clearly. My immediate response was to question. What would giving gratitude yield? What was its purpose? These words were first heard back in the mid-nineties, and since that time gratitude and I have undergone a lengthy transformative journey of learning, healing, and manifesting. 

You’re busy, right? If you’re nodding your head, then the answer is yes and we have something in common: not enough time. And perhaps the sense that large things can’t be created or conquered because we don’t have the big time they require.

I offer a simple solution: Make intentional ten-minute efforts every day.

This idea was born out of necessity in my life. During a recent summer, I was still in the labor-intensive phase of raising my young son. I longed to put in a flower garden, but as a single parent with neither partner nor family nearby, time for such endeavors did not exist. Still, I wanted that garden.

Thoughts are things. They can heal or harm. Beliefs mold your brain. This is not just a figurative metaphor for what happens. Your brain literally stiffens, slows and loses function in direct relationship to your thoughts, beliefs and attitudes about you and your place in the world. How each of us responds to our life -- to our perceptions -- has enormous implications for how we feel, how we age and the health of our brain.
       
The most powerful pharmacy in the world is right between your ears!   Other than eating breakfast regularly, and eating more fruits and vegetables, the one characteristic that is present in all healthy older people is resiliency. Resiliency is that hard-to-measure quality of adapting to change, shifting with changing tides rather than drowning, seeing the glass half full, or knowing how to turn lemons into lemonade.