Counting good things

Last year sometime I read about the concept of counting up to 1000 gifts, ie good things that I see each day. It was from Ann Voskamp's blog, inspired by a dare from a helpful friend of hers and probably a tool many have used over the eons in different ways.

It was odd getting to the magic 4 digit number and realising the obvious, I'm now carrying on with numbering through dates like 1066. I'm still in the second millenium. I may alter to simply doing a list for each day after I hit 2011.

Each year S is given a massive tome of a desk diary by a generous company. It is exactly right for me. I used to use it to note narrations, ie things T and H told me about, a doable version of the Charlotte Mason narration technique. It also held nature observations, but now it is just for 'things I am grateful for' last thing at night.

To counter gratitude I am still working on a daytime alternate version, a problems book, where each problem can be numbered and given a page where I note ideas for tackling it. For me this is a way of being real about the not so good aspects of life and giving them a home rather than worrying around them and carrying them in my head all my waking hours.

It took time for me to learn how the gratitude book worked best for me and it is still taking time for me to find the best way of using my problem book. At the moment I am in a non action phase with it, but I know that when I come back to it I will have moved on in some way and will be closer to using it well for me or finding a different method.