Tuesday, November 5, 2013

30 days of thankfulness

Inspired by my dear husband I have been posting 30 days of Thanksgiving on my Facebook page.  One thankful item per day since the first of November. This is more difficult than it sounds.  Being a person who generally has a sarcastic and somewhat negative point of view. Oh and that tendency I have to be a tad forgetful. So here I am on my blog complaining about having to be thankful for 30 days. "That there is what you call ironical." It's not that I'm not genuinely thankful for many things. It's that I don't tend to think about them much. I could create a log of my 30 days here.  But I think that would be a little redundant. I could insert here an explanation of each item I am thankful for. Boring!

There is actually a deeper explanation to my personal failings at being thankful "out loud and public". I call it the dropped shoe syndrome. If I admit out loud that something good happened to me or that I perceived that something was good then either the good will end,  stop happening or worse yet, the good will be horribly reversed. See I told you I was negatively wired.

There is a bright side to all of this.  I have in the past few years "seen the light of my ways" and am attempting to correct this engrained response to good things. Now that's something to be thankful for!

This blog has been an experiment in voice recording. I wanted to put in that disclaimer, so I guess I'm grateful for the technology that allows me to record my "brilliant" thoughts while driving, because of course that is when I have them. And yes I know texting and driving are not safe. A. This is blogging, not texting. B. I'm using a voice recording system which allows me to keep my eyes on the road and my hands on the steering wheel. Still the results are not terribly satisfying as the voice recognition software does not include punctuations. So I have to go back and manually enter appropriate punctuation.  Guess that's the down side to this good thing.

Back to my thirty days of thanksgiving. Do you have any idea how hard it is to take a negative thing and find the thanksgiving in it? Seems like ever since I decided to follow dear Husband's lead, I've had a series of personal issues come up that are hardly what I'd call thanksgiving material. Two or three health issues, an overly emotional bit of news/drama from a difficult family member and the usual litany of automotive and financial concerns. Combined with my native lack of talent in the "joyful living" category and you have a perfect recipe for a certain lack of thankful. Not that I'm some kind of emotional vampire. (Those known for sucking the joy out of every room.) It's just that happy/happy is not my first thought in any given situation.  I'd be really identifying my age group if I started throwing around hints like I'm not exactly the Doris Day type.  Now here is where you're expecting me too insert a line about how I have found a way to do that little turn a frown upside down trick. But I'm not going to. Because I don't have one. I just sit there starring at my screen and the words don't come. Which cleverly brings me back to my voice recording experiment. See my best ideas come during my often silent drive to work each day. Problem is, by the time I reach the office, where I could safely write those clever thoughts down, they have vanished. Solution = Voice recorder.

Thinking now that I actually have a good reason for creating a side list of those nearly thirty thankful things. But that's another blog.