Gratitude.
I written about gratitude before, and how it’s something I feel I (we?) am not always good at.
Not failure to express thanks for a specific gift/present/deed,(I can be embarassingly effusive) but rather an absence of proper appreciation of “what we have”, or pehaps more correctly, “where we are and who we have around us”.
I have previously reflected that we lack a “Thanksgiving” – and I do not mean the crass commercialism of the US event (no worse than our own Christmas I may add). A time to reflect on the good fortune that we have.
I am not religious in any formal sense, although I have friends and kin who are, and perhaps, for them, this need is met in regular worship, but I was raised in a family with faith and a faith school and (by extension) community, and even looking back, I do not feel the “thanks” in anything taught or said. Of course that could just be me.
Last year, a very dear friend suggested I keep a “Diary of Gratitude”,# – at the start of each day write down three things you are thankful for. I have done this now (as regularly as shift work will allow) for six months, and I find that I am the better for it.
Perhaps, a kind of vitamin C tablet for the soul.
I ramble (as ever). Went for a run with my younger son last night (the budding trainer/coach/fitness guru). 200m (I’m told), in the very wet rain. On the principaI that what does not kill me makes me stronger (or at least more sarcastic), as it nearly killed me, I should be a whole lot stronger today. Still, I am able to write (I am grateful) ..to have run with my son.
It is the small things that really matter.
# I had an elaborate blank book which I had been saving for years, I-knew-not why. Sometimes the universe is like that.
Next week on IaDL: Probably some digging injury
Dalmallyfest the Asylum 