Gratitude

Recently I've been enjoying how people are doing the 5 days of gratitude on FB.

I like that friends are having fun in the positive activity of writing about things they appreciate.

Beyond the 'my dear family, friends, place I live etc' I love it when they go deeper and more abstract, however it's rare. Mostly people want to write about the big obvious stuff.

Yesterday, instead of the big important stuff that I'm always waxing on about how lucky I am to have, I instead found myself imagining a super banal list of gratitudes:

1. The coffee pot that sits on a kettle element which is so smart it switches itself off after making just the right amount of coffee.

2. That I like...

You know what, the list I was amusing myself with in my head while I put a load of washing on, was so boring that I can't even remember it now. But it served it's purpose, I was grinning at my own little 'in joke' and feeling, well, gratitude.

That's the thing about gratitude, if we can be thankful for the little stuff- that the sun is shining, or that the rain is pretty, that the green leaves blowing in this crazy southerly look lovely, or a plastic bag blowing on a drive way ala American Beauty is poetic, quietly in it's own way - then the act of contemplating gratitude has worked it's magic.

It's a happier state of mind to be in, rather than dwelling on whatever else was whooshing through ya mind. As I've heard it said 'administration, ills and lows'. (Ten points for who can identify that bit of pop music) There is all the rest of the time to get stuck on that stuff, so for even the small moment when I was being ironically grateful, laughing away to myself, I was totally in this lovely positive space anyway.

So, I'm grateful for that too.