Oh lord, I am tired! I have been making “microchanges” in my life–tiny changes in habit, routine, practice that over time will lead to bigger outcomes. One of those has been to adjust what happens when I get home in the evening, to adjust my routine with the ultimate outcome of getting to bed/sleep earlier. I started this a on Monday, making small changes here and there in when I eat dinner, how long I watch television (I generally only watch the national news during week nights, then veg out on my favorite shows over the weekend), what time I start writing this blog, and what time I put the computer away for the evening. In spite of having gotten to sleep earlier the last few nights, I still feel tired. I suppose I need to keep at it for a while to allow the cumulative effects to build up so that over time I’ll gradually move toward getting more rest and improved overall wellbeing.
Tonight I am grateful for having a body of work to fall back on when the muse is hiding out. So I decided to “spin the wheel” and let the random number generator pick the subject of tonight’s blog by pointing me toward an earlier post. Interestingly, today’s number is 2. It was interesting re-reading my second gratitude blog, written on July 1, 2011. After only one day, my resolve to write about something I am grateful for was already tested:
One of the things that often happens when you put something out there is that what you put out (a concept, an idea, etc.) immediately gets challenged. Take my decision to write daily about at least one thing that I’m grateful for. It wasn’t the words I wrote yesterday that got challenged, but the thing itself. Yesterday was a good day, alright at the beginning, strong in the middle and pretty good at the end. So in that spirit I came home and wrote my first lesson in gratitude. Today has in fact been a very different day.
Today was one of those days that, unlike yesterday, started off shaky, got harder in the middle and this evening I find that I am digging deep to close it out on a positive note. And so along with my list of ten things I am grateful for (like the incredible privilege of having a computer that allows me to communicate with so many people instantaneously) I want to focus this evening on how very grateful I am for the strength of will I have to get up in the morning and get myself through the day.
Over the past few months I’ve had what Lemony Snicket calls “a series of unfortunate events” happen in my life. They were the kinds of things that find their way onto those, “10 most stressful life events” lists. I remember as all these things were piling on feeling pretty terrible about my lot in life and expressing serious uncertainty as to how I was going to make it. In the midst of all of this, the tornadoes hit Tuscaloosa Alabama and as I watched people literally picking up the pieces of their lives off of the ground, I realized that while things in my life were hard, they could have been much, much harder.
Being grateful for something is not that hard. I couldn’t throw a rock in any direction from where I’m sitting right now and not hit something that I appreciate and am grateful for in my life. This is not to diminish the severity of the challenges I and so many others in the world right now are facing; they are quite real. But somewhere inside of each of us there is a wellspring of gratitude or faith or happiness or hope or something that is available to us to tap into if we can just figure out how. It really is a matter of perspective.
I am grateful to have kept this record over all these months: it serves as a reminder of so many important lessons I learned from living through a difficult period and an accounting of so many blessings that are evident throughout my life. Over 150 people read this entry when I first posted it all those months ago–quite a bit fewer than that will re-read the excerpt of it tonight. I continue to write for me as well as you, though I am grateful for your “company” on the path and the appreciation I receive from readers who periodically comment when I post the link on Facebook. You help me keep going.
I am trusting that the microshifts I’m making now will begin to bear fruit. I am looking forward to approaching my life from a place of strength and wellbeing that will be reflected in what I choose to write about in this blog each night. In the meantime I will be here with a grateful heart and a random number generator to help me get going. Thank goodness!
