I have detected in myself lately a snakiness about small stuff. I've been complaining about the weather, of all things! This is not good.
As a result, I've decided to take my mind off the negative by training it to look for the positive. One way is by practicing thankfulness.
There are many online initiatives to help us focus on thankfulness. I've decided to join the Gratitude Community begun some time ago by Anne Voskamp at her Holy Experience blog. She explains how it began here.
The object of the exercise: to, over time, make a list of One Thousand Gifts for which she is grateful. (I believe she is well on her way to 2000, however, and is now calling them "endless gifts".)
I will collect my items and post a few every week.
And I begin...
1. It is a gift that my family is intact. I helped out at a funeral tea yesterday, for a 27-year-old man. When I saw the year of his birth on the memorial bulletin, my stomach lurched: 1983. That's the year my daughter was born. He died, suddenly and they don't know the cause. My family is still intact. I hug them close for I know there are no assurances.
2. Summer has arrived! (I am allowed to be thankful for the weather, right?) It's 23C as I write this at 6:45 p.m. Yummm!
3. Today I got a laptop. I'm going to love it — no longer chained to my office!
4. And I'm thankful for hubby, who said why didn't I get the new machine instead of the reconditioned one that would have saved some hundreds (but was several years old, didn't qualify for Apple Care and had about half the numbers in the specifications department). Of course I'm sharing it with him; he's browsing on it right now.
If you'd like to climb on the Thousand Gifts wagon, please do. Some post their gifts on blogs, while others list them in private journals. Instructions on how to join are here.
4 comments:
Man I AM getting old. - ha ha - but at least I've done what I wanted to by this age.
Sonia - you're not old!! And what a blessing to know what you want and to have done it. (I couldn't say the same thing at your age.)
Thanks for starting. I'm joining you! I've thought of doing it for awhile but this nudged me over the edge. I think it'll be fun to be close to where someone else is.
~Irene
Irene, that's great! (Yes it a good thing this is not a competition, or we'd have lost before the race ever started. I think this has been going on for quite a while!)
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