Like many, COVID-19 news and the stress of 2020 have been getting me down.

Two weeks ago

Given the season is one of thanksgiving, two weeks ago I tried something completely new to me. I never expected to be someone to start journaling – I just don’t have the time or honestly usually the interest, although I tried some when the kids were little, for the sake of recording their milestones. And I usually feel like I’m pretty good at being realistic about how good my life is. So two Sundays ago when I was feeling overwhelmed by the gloomy COVID-19 news I was reading, I was surprised to find in response to feeling overwhelmed, that the idea of a bullet gratitude journal popped into my brain, and the ideal appealed.

But I don’t keep journals around the house. And I really like the paper goods at Current; I’ve loved fancy paper goods since my elementary school days when Lisa Frank rainbow items were so popular (and I almost never got any; if I got any, I kept them pristine to admire instead of using them). So surely I must need to get a nice journal to write in. Cut to me digging through all of the hard bound blank books at Current. $20 and I have to wait for shipping? No, shipping can take too long. What if I look at Target, or Michael’s, where I could get curb side pick up, right here in town? I think I went through 60+ tabs of products, between the three stores. Looked through those, couldn’t find anything I liked, and didn’t feel like fighting the crazy parking lots.

I finally decided on digging out a not hard cover, little (3.5×5.5″) note pad I already had in the basement, and to just get started. If I can stick it out, use this consistently, and enjoy it, then when I fill it up, my maybe next book could be more along the lines of what I’m drooling over. And yes, I was actually planning to write in it instead of admiring it without sullying it.

Parenting side point:

That’s something I have been trying to encourage my kids to do as they get neat things, that they can use them instead of putting them on a shelf to admire (to the point where I’ve taken to telling them, if they use it up, then I will certainly buy them more; no they’re still not using them up, but we’re making progress). Same concept with a chess book that kids turned into a write-in workbook before we caught them at it – compared to the price of all of the workbooks they could have to add up to a book that big, I said fine, we’ll buy a second copy of that chess book for the second kiddo, go for it first kiddo, use it up.

So that was two weeks ago. How have I done at using it, and what have I thought?

Report from today, after two weeks of use

I started by filling in what I could remember of the prior week, so I’ve actually got 3 weeks of gratitude bullet points worth written down. I may already be 1/4 of the way through this little book. I haven’t had time to write daily, in fact I caught up on the entire past week this afternoon. I may need to place it somewhere else. Other people put it by their beds, but by the time I’m finally crawling into bed I’ll be asleep in minutes, and the light isn’t convenient to my side of the bed. Mine is instead by the computer, which theoretically would be a good location. Gonna have to think about other options.

I didn’t write daily, but when I did write, I wrote in stuff for every day. Sometimes I had to go look for clues about the day, from the family calendar or from my email, but I did get something down to be grateful for, for every single day.

And I typically had 1.5-3 full pages of bulleted notes for every day. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, thoroughness and documentation are two of my strong points. But it was surprising that even when I was trying to keep things brief, in bulleted format, that I was able to get that much down. (Maybe if I keep up this experiment, I don’t want to go to a bigger journal, 1-2 sides on this little page might not turn into much in an 8x5x11″ journal)

The next surprise was that when I looked back over the three weeks of gratitude, not even a month worth, it felt like that should have been 1.5 months or more worth of good stuff, there was so much there. Yes, a lot of it was the “little stuff”, such as:

• the board games with kids during Thanksgiving break
• the teaching tangents we go off on constantly (today was the physics of the Arctic ice cap, instigated by half-frozen leftover breakfast smoothie with a remaining liquid center that we’d pulled out of the freezer for snack)
• that I was able to give my husband a multi-hour nap today
• I found a great custom present for our micropod teacher
• colleagues are trusting me to be a shoulder to lean on
• beautiful fat snow flakes fell for much of one day. And they didn’t cause bad driving conditions.

But as I inscribed in the very first page of this journal, to explain why I started this unexpected journey:

Gratitude:

Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.

Robert Brault

Whether it’s big things, little things, or big things masquerading as little things, if you haven’t tried documenting the really good things in your life before, December 2020 may just be the time to try it.