October's Gratitude
So this month got a bit busier than I would have liked. I managed to stay on top of my daily gratitudes and am only slightly behind in my thank-you notes, but I have not started the process of thanking authors as I wanted to do. So I've got my work cut out for me for November but that makes sense as well since November does include Thanksgiving, right?
In looking at the total count of gratitude notes that I've logged, I'm somewhere in 1000s which is nice to see and I'm curious what the word cloud will look like at the end of the year. What will stick out as my biggest themes? I've got a few guesses (certainly, my cats, my partner, my body, and access to essentials always rank high).
In this month's cloud, I notice that learning, partner, body, opportunities, friends, and life stick out rather strongly. Given the opportunities I had to spend with friends and professional colleagues this month, that doesn't seem so surprising. I also realize that since I work out in the morning and it's usually after a workout that I do my gratitude journal, that body stands out as much as it does. It is a luxury to get to have the time and resources to be able to work out my body in ways that I choose and that my body is healthy enough to push in the ways that I do. I also found October percolate with several different professional opportunities that I am also grateful to be able to part-take in.
So this marks ten months of expressing daily gratitude and if I were to sum up the impact on me in terms of how it has affected me, I would say that it just pushes me to notice and speak up more toward being grateful to the world around me. It can be easy to engage in a negative downward spiral of how horrible things are. There are certainly horrible things happening all the time. Yet as a result of many things beyond my control (my class, race, gender, geographical original) and a very few (in contrast) things that are in my control, I am not subject to horrible things and am increasingly aware of that through my own active learning and observations as well as this gratitude journey. Thus, as I see more reasons to be thankful to people, places, and events, I speak to them even more.
Catch up on previous months' gratitude reflections:
By Any Other Nerd Blog by Lance Eaton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
In this month's cloud, I notice that learning, partner, body, opportunities, friends, and life stick out rather strongly. Given the opportunities I had to spend with friends and professional colleagues this month, that doesn't seem so surprising. I also realize that since I work out in the morning and it's usually after a workout that I do my gratitude journal, that body stands out as much as it does. It is a luxury to get to have the time and resources to be able to work out my body in ways that I choose and that my body is healthy enough to push in the ways that I do. I also found October percolate with several different professional opportunities that I am also grateful to be able to part-take in.
So this marks ten months of expressing daily gratitude and if I were to sum up the impact on me in terms of how it has affected me, I would say that it just pushes me to notice and speak up more toward being grateful to the world around me. It can be easy to engage in a negative downward spiral of how horrible things are. There are certainly horrible things happening all the time. Yet as a result of many things beyond my control (my class, race, gender, geographical original) and a very few (in contrast) things that are in my control, I am not subject to horrible things and am increasingly aware of that through my own active learning and observations as well as this gratitude journey. Thus, as I see more reasons to be thankful to people, places, and events, I speak to them even more.
Catch up on previous months' gratitude reflections:
- September's Gratitude
- August's Gratitude
- July's Gratitude
- June's Gratitude
- May's Gratitude
- April's Gratitude
- March's Gratitude
- February's Gratitude
- January's Gratitude
By Any Other Nerd Blog by Lance Eaton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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