Hey, friends, it’s Angie checking in this week.
A few years ago, a group of my online friends on a glass forum had a practice of listing five good things in our lives at the end of every day. This was long before ‘gratitude journals’ or other similar marketing ideas became popular. We did it because it made us all be more cognizant of recognizing the small things that made our lives better each day, and it made it easier to let the less pleasant aspects of the day go without obsessing about them.
I won’t lie and say it was always easy. At first, there were a few days where I struggled to come up with something better than “I woke up this morning” just to get my fifth and final entry. But the longer we shared our lists with each other, the easier it became to acknowledge that something as simple as the perfect piece of pie or a compliment from a complete stranger could totally turn a bad day into a good one if we could only learn to focus on the positive instead of the negative.
As many of us began to drift away from that core group with the onset of social media sites and other distractions that pulled our attention from that original online hangout, I gradually fell out of the habit of thinking about and recording my five good things every day. And I have to admit that I realized a while back that failing to focus on those little positive things in my life had let me slip back into allowing the negativity in the world to bombard me all over again. So a few months ago when the New York Times launched their weekly Good List newsletter, I was inspired to try and pick the practice back up again. I dug out a lovely journal that a good friend gifted me for Christmas and started trying to concentrate on the good things in life again, no matter how small. I haven’t managed to make it a daily habit again… yet, but I’m getting there, and my outlook has already changed for the better. It’s amazing how quickly I remembered that the quality of my life is shaped less by huge milestones and more by small, intimate moments that tend to be overshadowed unless I’m really open to experiencing them fully. Life is so full of big distractions, often very negative ones. So we need to retrain our brains to latch onto those things that bring us joy, even if it’s only for a moment.
I hope that this post will inspire you to try making your own daily (or weekly!) Five Good Things list. If you’re not ready to commit to keeping a written journal, try using the Notes app on your phone. After all, it’s with you constantly, and you can jot things down as they happen. And in case you need a little more prodding, or just need some uplifting news in your life every week, you can read back issues and sign up for your own free subscription to the Good List here. It’s well worth the five-minutes it’ll take you to read it each week, and can’t we all use some positive inspiration these days?