Yesterday, I wrapped up 30 days of recognizing and recording three things each day for which I was/am grateful. I did something similar last year, in that I started to keep track of things for which I’m grateful on a piece of paper. And for the first several days, I had a sense of euphoria all the time.
A week and a half into keeping track, I got a bad cold and stress from work overcame me. At that point, I wanted nothing to do with the challenge. I was depressed because it hadn’t “fixed” me. It had not made things better, permanently, immediately.
I went into this challenge in a different way. With wise counsel from my wife, I disregarded Pam Grout’s examples1 of daily gratitudes and kept track of the things that are “normal” or regular occurrences. This took an enormous amount of pressure off of the challenge.
This time around, I had that enlightened feeling and easy-going vibe throughout the beginning posts. Towards the middle and through the end, though, it was a struggle. Even when I felt peace and joy in reviewing and acknowledging my gratitudes, I did not end up feeling light. I did not end up with my mind operating on a high frequency vibration.
I wanted to, though. When I was in that state at the beginning, my heart was open and I was helping people and sharing smiles and love and encouragement and it was glorious! Eventually, it all became too much, again, and I retreated back to feeling like things would never really change.
Nonetheless, I’m grateful for the experience. And I want to work through this some more. Because I do believe that life can change when you are grateful and acknowledge that you have all that you need. I just need to get to a place where, at my core, I believe that I do have all that I need.
- If I recall correctly, she mentioned that she was a travel writer and then listed off three things, including swimming with turtles in some tropical paradise. This completely threw me off the first time. I am coming to this book with a desire to not be in debt and to recognize what it is my life that I already have and most of the things would seem “pedestrian” to an outsider. But that’s what I have. And they are great things. But I’m not going to have something as great as swimming with turtles in my DAILY life. Good grief. It almost made me give up on the whole thing. “Uh, I was going to write down coffee and a comfy couch but that’s not any where close to swimming with the turtles.” If it wasn’t for Amanda discussing this through with me, I would have bailed altogether. ↩︎