Success and Freedom

What I Learned From Keeping a Gratitude Journal (part 3)

The idea of a gratitude journal is worthy; the commitment, difficult.

The idea of a gratitude journal is worthy; the commitment, difficult. I told myself I’d stick with meditation after a similar monthly experiment for SUCCESS last spring; concentrated mindfulness hasn’t exactly become a daily routine.

Still, my journaling taught me a lesson that proved similar to that monthlong flirtation with meditation. Probably, by the time you read this, I’m no longer keeping my gratitude journal. It very well might fade, like a disappointing percentage of my attempts to inject productive self-improvement into the spaces of my day generally reserved for stuff such as Super Mario Kart 8. Even at the dawn of the new year—or especially at it—ambition makes a grand, striding entrance, and in short order it is knocked on its silly face by the machinery of daily life, in all its own grand, dull meaning.

At the same time, the seeds of gratitude are there, and they’ll remain. Somewhere in my cluttered, crowded brain folds there’s the notion that gratitude heals. The seed of the idea—to shut up and give thanks more than once every few months—is planted. How it sprouts is up to time. “If you wake up and think, I am grateful that today, blank” says Jantz, “you begin to think in a different way.” And that part worked for me. Well, that and the real coffee.

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