Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Gratitude

This Thursday, NaBloPoMo 2 begins. I will be blogging each day for the month of November (Have a blog? Join in! Click the button on the right.). Some people are blogging with a theme. Last night, I was tossing and turning and feeling very frustrated with the fact that I couldn't fall asleep. I couldn't turn off my brain enough to relax. It was too late to take something for it and I was pretty pissed off. So I came up with a theme myself.

Often, it is at 12:30 to 1AM, when I cannot sleep, that I start writing blog posts in my head. I was making a list of all my grievances in my mind, fully prepared to spew forth this morning with line after line of all the things that are bugging me right now. I could tell you about my hair breakage due to stress or about the fact that my alarm was set to a strange station and did not go off yesterday. I could bitch and moan about inconsiderate people, my job, my belly pooch. Really, I could start writing now and probably make it non-stop through next year.

Isn't that sad? For the past little while I have been focusing on all of the petty annoyances throughout my day. The parent who can't be on time or control their child. The nonstop chatter of a four year old who won't just give me five minutes to relax. The little noises that I hear in the night that keep me from sleep...

Then a light bulb went off. I asked myself what life would be like if I simply let shit go. So for the next thirty some odd days, I'm not going to focus on the negative in life. This will instead become my personal gratitude journal.

I am, of course and without question, immensely grateful to have my husband and son in my life. I'm grateful for my health, my home, my family, my friends. The big things? No doubt. Do I always show the people I love how I feel? Absolutely not. But it's there. I would not be the person I am today without these people. I appreciate the fact that I'm healthy. I don't do much to affect that, so it really is a miracle! There is just so much to be grateful for in my life. Funnily enough, when I focus on the good things, I don't have much room for the bad feelings.

So each day, I will post one thing that brightens my day or that I'm grateful for. It may not always be a profound something. It may be silly. It may be too deep to adequately express. Who knows? But the bottom line is that I am training myself to look for the good. It's already working...

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