Pedestrian Blessings
During the most chaotic spans of my life, I’ve kept a gratitude journal. When my kids were little and I was building a college basketball program, I kept one religiously. It was my calibrator. Daily, it seemed, an avalanche of things that either came out of left field or simply did not go as planned would pile into the sanctuary of my mind. When I closed my eyes at night, my brain would re-count them as if at confession. While tons of good stuff obviously happened, too, it didn’t naturally land in pews of prominence. So I had to put it there.
Sara Ban Breathnach’s Simple Abundance Gratitude Journal was my prompt.
The book, built for awareness stacking, was a companion to Breathnach’s bonafide NYTimes bestseller, Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy. The journal was a glorified hardcover calendar with a smattering of famous quotes and very few original words—just page after page after page of a month and a date followed by five blank lines. Sales were nuts. The Simple Abundance tidal wave engulfed new moms, striving yuppies, busy dads, grandparents--those of all ages warm to the idea of paying better attention --and many who merely felt pressured to dive into something Oprah winked at.
I wrote in my hardcover journal every night before I passed out on my pillow.
Doesn’t it seem like a legal pad or the back of a torn-open envelope could have done the very same thing? Of course it could have. But it didn’t. And it doesn’t. Things worth counting and keeping cry for a hallowed home.
I don’t know if it’s simply the palpable awareness of blessings or the measuring of the good against the not-so-much that provides such value. My hunch is that it’s probably both. But appreciation tabulation is like a pair of hands on my shoulders that reminds me to tighten my abs and lengthen my neck. The practice tells me to stand tall, and when I do, I can see so much better—not only where I’ve been but where I want to go. Sometimes inside the clutter those both get eclipsed from view.
I open my decades-old blessing books every year around this time to peruse what I once wrote. Some entries were made in pencil, though most were done in pen, with a few haphazard scrawlings in crayon (which told me a lot about that day). I can feel how tired I was. And how happy. As I read back over a month or two in bulk, I also realize how the practice of compilation bent the light, kind of like the curved glass of a microscope does. And in so doing, how it subtly shifted the way I saw my world.
Among those things listed in my 1990s hardbound journals are simple things like “rain.” And “red -cheeked children.” And “belly laughs.” Every now and then there is a biggie . . .“negative test result” . . . “my dad’s face at grandparents’ day” . . . “tournament air—the way it smells when a championship is cooking.” One random entry I stumbled upon had only one line of the five filled out. I had surrendered: “Today is over. Tomorrow, I get another shot.”
Some days the best we can do is turn the page.
One-of-a-kind moments of both celebration and contrite resignation were dispersed throughout my lists, but mostly the entries were simple abundance--the things we gloss right over as we run, as if there’s somewhere more important to be than where we already are.
As I unfurled the covers of my journals this past weekend, the thank-you trinkets spilled out like Christmas ornaments. I remembered how Chandler as a two-year-old used to hug me tight right after she threw a fit, and I had forgotten what Colton’s face looked like right before he hurled a baseball toward home plate. Specific “where and when” moments, like the San Diego Zoo ornament I hang on our Christmas tree, tumbled out and took me back. But there were also lots of “tears” and “hugs” and “sunsets” and “giggles” that could have fallen out of anybody’s hard bound paper treasure chest. Pedestrian blessings (if there is such a thing) that we have but look right over unless something is compelling us to stop and write them down. My journals were the reins on a too fast life.
It occurs to me now as I re-read my scribbles, that the cataloguing was maybe as much of a want as it was a need. Certainly, the entries forced accurate accounting of highs and lows while providing order for my days and a governor for my pace, but they also gave me a place to put things I didn’t want to lose. Gratitude journaling has a way of crystallizing the vapors before they get away. Because I wrote out bullet lists, my blessings turned into items I could carry around in my pocket or take out of the box to play with many years on down the road. They became forever things.
Blessings that get counted live to bless another day. They layer up and replicate, serving the moment, framing the future, and wrapping up the past. No wonder the Bible encourages us to count them one by one.
Abundance is simply everywhere. Though odds are we forget it if we fail to write it down.