Spring is very definitely sprung, and here in Glasgow we have actually enjoyed some warm and sunny days. Hanging washing up on the line outside is one of those small but most precious pleasures that is mindful in the doing and fills me with such smug satisfaction. Wandering around where we live we see folk come out in droves to enjoy the sun, languish in the park, or swamp the many outside cafe/bar seating areas that for much of the year, are too cold or wet to enjoy.
Beautiful flowers everywhere, so much greenery, a wondrous cacophony of birdsong on my early morning walk.
I am stopping to notice as a type of gratitude practice.
And as spring progresses, so too does 2023. Four and a half months in and…
How full is your jar of good things?
I wrote what turned out to be a very popular blog post in January of this year, describing a lovely gratitude practice I came across – keeping a Jar of Good things for the full year.
You can read about it here.
If you started your jar in January, are you still going with the practice?
That is not to make you feel guilty, but simply to serve as a wee encouragement to get back into the habit.
Recording regularly what we are thankful for is a wonderful way to keep our perspective positive in the face of life’s challenges, mundanities and hardships. There is a growing body of evidence to show that gratitude is good for our mental and physical health. Noticing what is good and practicing being grateful for it is a great precursor to kindness as it lifts us out of ourselves and our potential negativity and encourages us to be kinder to each other. More on that here.
And of course, we always have the Muppets to teach us much about choosing to have a thankful heart even in the face of life’s challenges.
If you are keeping going with your jar, I salute and encourage you! A friend sent me a photo recently of their jar, filling up wonderfully with little reminders of all that has been good about the year so far. My heart was gladdened.
But maybe your habit of jar filling has slipped a wee bit off the bottom of your weekly habits?
Can I encourage you to resume your gratitude practice?
This is not about legalism or perfectionism or any-other-ism.
This is about stopping, noticing and taking time to see what is GOOD about life right now. This also helps us redirect our thoughts to build positive evidence rather than going down the mine shaft of negative thinking.
You can catch up with as many weeks as you choose. Or you can resume from today. It matters not. But taking 5 minutes each week to record one good thing from that week and add that to a cumulative pile of them is a great way to continue with this year.
In this house, our jar is filling up. There have been a couple of weeks when we have forgotten or been too distracted by other things, but we catch up. Most of this year so far there have been three of us adding our thoughts to the jar, some weeks there are four. We were musing last week about keeping 2023’s jar at the end of this year and starting a new one for 2024, and then gradually acquiring a collection of jars that serve as mini time capsules of our years lived on this planet.
What a fun gratitude practice!
If you work as a team, maybe you could have an office or team jar. Every week, as a team, you take a few minutes to see what you HAVE achieved and what has been good that week, and record it for posterity. At the end of the year you will have a record of all positives and achievements for your team. In the face of busyness and growing pressures on businesses everywhere, this might be a small, inspiring act that brings some balance to your week.
Whatever you decide to do having read this, I encourage you to find your own gratitude practice and stick to it. We will revisit together in the autumn how we are all doing!