Life Matters Blog | Life Matters, Spiritual Matters

Spiritual Matters: Grateful for Gratitude

If you use your journal like I do, you use it for everything, scribbling down various thoughts, desires, heartaches, happenings, and everything in between, including action items and gratitude lists. Let’s focus on this last one: gratitude lists.

For me, the practice of creating gratitude lists started during a stressful time. I wasn’t sleeping well, waking up in the middle of the night, insomnia for months. Upon sharing my issue, the resulting recommendation was to come up with a list of ten things I was grateful for, and even more specifically, the items had to come from the day that had just passed. So it began, but first just mentally, a list of ten items for which I was grateful, counting on my fingers in the middle of the night.

But it didn’t end there, because I still woke up and stayed awake, the insomnia continuing. Not able to come up with another solution myself, the same person said, “Well, then make it thirty-six things.” Thirty-six things? That seemed impossible, especially during such a stressful time. But I tried it anyway.