Gratitude...

Okay, I'll make it a triple header...

Doing Prompt of the Day this month. Basically I took the Picture of the Day list from Fat Mum Slim and turned it into Prompt of the Day instead. It was a good list of things I thought I could work with so I decided not to pass it up.

Today's prompt was "I'm grateful for..."

Yeah, I laughed when I saw it too. I do a Daily Gratitude post on Facebook already, and I've been a gratitude practitioner for as long as I can remember. Practitioner of gratitude? Is that better? Overtly grateful?

However you want to phrase it, I'm a grateful person.

I can tell you that it started when I was very young. And it was tied to my religious beliefs at the time. Or I guess spiritual more than religion. It wasn't something the church said I should do, I just felt like it should be done. See, everyone prays when they need something but I felt like that was kind of wrong. I mean you know how you feel about people who only call you when they need something right? So I would make sure to do short little prayers of thanks. See a beautiful sunset? Thank you for this sunset and the way the orange color fades into the pink. Run into a friend unexpectedly and have a nice visit? Thank you for putting Lisa in my path today. And on and on.

It was a habit. A thank you habit. A gratitude habit.

And even years after I left the church I found myself doing it. Driving down the road, Thank you for the AC in my car and the reliability of my transportation. Sitting by the ocean, Thank you for the sound the waves make when they hit the shore. But the difference was I wasn't addressing them to God anymore, I was just sending out a general thank you to the world. I left the church but I didn't leave my gratitude practice. It had just changed.

Eventually it shifted to those random thank yous during the day and then a last of the day thought process of "I'm thankful for this..." and then I would go to sleep. I think I must have picked that one up during my Spiritual Searching in the 90s. Gratitude Journals were a thing, and even though a blog is really just a journal, I was lousy at journaling. Always had been. So it was just a bedtime ritual. Think a positive thought about the day or about my life right before sleep.

Then came Facebook and one year I saw someone do a Thirty Days of Thanks thing. Everyday in November they would post one thing they were thankful for, tied to Thanksgiving. I really liked the idea and started doing it every year.

Then a few years ago I went to a continuing education seminar about happy people. What to do to be happy, what to do to stay happy. Science based. Surprisingly Be Denise wasn't one of the things BUT one of the things that was talked about was daily gratitude. And specifically sharing that daily gratitude. Brian King (the speaker and also a friend of mine) challenged everyone to do a Daily Gratitude post for a week (I think it was a week) but post 3 things about your day that you were grateful for and to share it on Facebook and to tag him and whoever else you wanted to. But the sharing and tagging was important because being grateful helps your own happiness but SHARING that gratitude helps other people's. He wanted tagged so he could get a little of that happy shine as well. And I'm sure that because accountability to someone else means more follow through and the advertisement for his seminar probably didn't hurt. Getting paid and having food on the table adds to happiness as well. ;-)

I didn't do it. I mean after all I already had my own daily gratitude practice so why do another one for seven days? Good idea to get someone jump started though, who might need it. Just not for me.

But as he toured the country I read a lot of gratitude posts from strangers. Because everyone who did do it, and followed the rules, tagged him so that meant that as a friend of his it showed up in my feed. I saw the standard grateful for family posts. The grateful for my house. Grateful for my job. Those things, but I also saw grateful that I am 6 months into remission. Grateful for my year sober chip. Grateful for getting the bigger piece of cake. Grateful that there was enough cream in the fridge for my coffee. Big and little gratitude and they all made me smile. One because they were familiar to me. The things I would send little thank yous out for. And two because people were genuinely grateful for some big deal things. And some little daily pleasures. Well...look at that. Public gratitude, even for an old hand at it, works.

So that year when I did my Thirty Days of Thanks I tagged him in the first one. Then came 2016 and I decided in an election year we could all use a little more gratitude so I took my Daily Gratitude public for the year. Now I still didn't follow his rules, exactly, I'm grateful that I don't feel obligated to follow rules after all...I didn't do three a day, some days I had three, some days I had more, some days I only had one, I didn't tag him or anyone else, but they were on my feed so all of my friends could see them. I posted things I was thankful/grateful for every day that year. Holy cow, it got hard in November, but it was really important to me to keep showing gratitude even though I was feeling less than gracious right then.

That's the thing with Gratitude, it gets hard to find when you need it the most. But there's always something there. If it's the way that your favorite t-shirt fits, that totally counts. If it's that you didn't succumb to screaming profanities at the world that day, that totally counts as well. You might have to look for it, but there is always something.

After 2016 I went back to just random gratitude postings and my Thirty Days of Thanks. But then last year as I approached my 50th birthday and made the decision to not treat it like a dirge but a celebration #FiftyisNifty I decided to add back in my public Daily Gratitude posts. Some of them deal with aging and how I'm grateful for a lot of things that go with that, but not all of them. Some of them are really big deal things. But not all of them. Some are stand alone grateful for this one thing. But not all of them. Some are repeats. I'm just as grateful for a great book today as I was 6 months ago, even if it's a different book.

And they make me happy.

And I have had friends tell me that they appreciate them, that they inspire them, that they are happy to see them. All of the good things that a public daily gratitude practice was said to deliver it did.

So today I'm grateful for my gratitude.

I'm grateful that it's part of me.

I'm grateful that Brian convinced me to take it public and share it with you.

Gratitude.