Lately I’ve taken special note of my appreciatives, my approbatories, my applaudables, and also those small salvific islands of gratitude lurking along the waterways of my supra-conciousness.
I make a grocery list of them. 1. I like being male. 2.I like being married. 3. I like being comedic.
These idiosynratic commendatories are my cognitive Jacanas, the colorful water birds living on my cerebral Lake Nicaragua, and I watch for them as I round the corners of my mental islands, putting along in my smoking, psychic motor boat, and I flush them out when I can — my favorables. I exult when they run on the tops of the lily pads on my everyday perspectives.
Dr. Christine Carter, excecutive director at the Greater Good Science Center at University of California Berkeley says her research shows that the more we practice gratitude the happier we will actually be. She suggests keeping a gratitude journal.
I respect Dr. Christine, and I appoint her my mentor, and in my mind, I mind her counsel and keep a mental journal of my gratefulness. I prop it up on the back shelf of my short-term memory and work it over. I listify my thankfuls, lining them up, one, two and three. 1. I am thankful for my black glossy cats with their ulta-soft, outrageously fluffy furification. 2. I am thankful for my wife, particularly her drop-dead gorgeous cerebral cortex and the droll and wry desultory three-storied thoughts housed therein 3. And I like my hazelnut coffee with milk every 6 am.
I love these and all of my other precious gratitudes. They are my safety nets, hanging above the lower levels of my extreme dissatisfactions. They are my psychological floaties; they keep me from drowning in my own deep waters; they are my sport’s brain seat belts, clamping me in my as I accelerate hard out of all my life’s sharp corners.
I trot them out often, my idosyncratic applaudables. 1. I like my house, the big windows and the odd angles of the high ceilings. 2. I like my two daughters, particularly the way the call me “daddy” and sit close to watch TV or just talk 3. I adore my job, the taylor-made, custom-designed, hyper-precise fit of it. 4. I love God and the way he loves me back and how he is so outrageously gentle, patient and gracious with me. 5. I like my pain, and how it eloquently informs me about being human.
By laying out my admirables like this, I anchor what I are grateful for in my brain. These positives, these pluses, these commemoratives — they moor me. When I don’t like something about my job, I coounter that with something I do like about my job. My thankfuls act like my very own team of counter-insurrgents against negativity. I don’t like my work stress, but I do love my work challenges, and so I embrace them, and I go on this way, cloaked with strength.
What will happen tomorrow? I think that more good will happen tomorrow, and if it does not, then I will roof over my losses with a thick thatch of approvables , and this is how I will survive, and shelter my happiness.
I will be thankful.
Thrive! 