Today has been another good, long day. It is a day for simple gratitude. This afternoon I got an email from a “feel good” group that I subscribed to a few years back. Every couple of weeks or so they send out a positive message. Today, as it often is, it was about gratitude, and I would characterize it as simple gratitude: being thankful for your bed and the warm covers you sleep under, for your comfy pajamas, for your toothbrush, for warm water in the shower, etc. It was a good reminder of how many dozens of small things over the course of a day that we can be grateful for.
This evening I am grateful for the contract work I’ve been doing. It was a blessing to have gotten it, thanks to a friend who was responsible for my creating one of the two contracts I’m working on. He essentially hired me for one contract and made it possible for me to be brought on to a second project of a very similar nature with the company he was working with. The end result is that I am working to bring in income using some parts of my brain and work experience I hadn’t used in a long while. And while it means I have to juggle my schedule a bit more to create time to search for full-time employment as well as work on writing projects, etc., it also means I’m not struggling quite so hard financially. Things are still incredibly tight and feel somewhat precarious, but there really does seem to be some breathing space that is slowly being created.
I am grateful for the technology that allows me to instantaneously communicate with people all around the world. I was recently reminiscing with my son about some of my early use of the “world wide web” back when it first started, and about my first “portable” computer, which was the size of a rollerboard suitcase and weighed about as much as that suitcase full of clothes would weigh. I laughed about how I’d had my master’s thesis typewritten back when I was completing my degree in the early 1980s. It was a bargain at $1 per page and $1.25 per page for graphs and tables. Ten years later I was typing my own doctoral dissertation on a little boxy Macintosh Plus personal computer before that gave way to an iMac. These days it’s almost unfathomable to imagine life before the internet, Skype, wireless technology and You Tube. Google has become a verb (“I’m going to google that.”) as well as a destination, “go to the Google.” Pretty much anything you want to know can be found on the internet, and plenty of other things you don’t want to know! I am exceedingly grateful that because of technology I can reach out and write to people about gratitude every day. My friend in Norway can read my blog as easily as friends right here in the Bay area.
These days my computer is acting a little funky, freezing and crashing unexpectedly. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, it’s so “old,” nearly six years old, if I recall properly. Things, particularly computer technology, aren’t used to lasting that long. Interesting how it has become such a lifeline for me–from prospective employment opportunities to connecting daily with friends and family through Facebook–it can seem hard to do without. Technology is a wonderful terrible thing, and while at one level it makes our lives infinitely easier, on another we can become enslaved by it. I hope I can continue to maintain some sense of balance with it all; though sometimes I spend way too much time tethered to the computer. I am grateful for all the tools I have around me to do what I need to do in the various arenas of my life. I don’t take any of them for granted.
Tonight I will be grateful to lay my head on my low tech pillow and get some rest. It’s only Monday and already I am tired! I look forward to having a good week. So may we all.
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