On Gratitude

At the beginning of the year, I was feeling a little pessimistic about life. Things were hard, it was hectic and money was tight and I felt like I was missing out on a lot of things because of our financial situation. I saw something somewhere on the internet about a memory jar. It was in response to people who write blog posts and Facebook status updates about how AMAZING their year was, what with meeting movie stars, dining with politicians, marrying their soul mates, traveling to some amazing country, winning the lottery, buying their dream house, WHATEVER......and you read that stuff and think MY LIFE SUCKS. THANKS FOR SHARING, ASSHOLE.

Anyway, I didn't have an empty jar, but I did have a wine bottle on my kitchen counter, so I used that. Throughout the year, I wrote things that made me happy on little scraps of paper and stuffed them in the bottle. There are a couple of big things, sure, like selling some photographs and getting a compliment on my work from a famous artist. Most of them, though, are just regular day to day things that made me feel really HAPPY. That bottle got pretty full this year, and I'm looking forward to breaking it open and remembering all of the good from 2013. After I'm done reading and reminiscing, I'll put all of those scraps in a little box or envelope, mark it 2013, and save it forever.

It was a worthwhile exercise in gratitude, one I'll do again and again. That bottle sat on my writing desk, with a box of card stock and scraps of pretty paper and a pen next to it. When I would sit down to do whatever, I would see it and think about the good things that happened that day, looking for the goodness.