My year always starts in a whirl wind. Summer holidays – family road trip – start of the new school year – AJ’s birthday – our anniversary – our holiday away sans kids – PJ’s birthday – my birthday – throw in Easter and this year Kidspot Voices of 2014 and I am well and truly exhausted by the end of April. May is like a welcome cool breeze that weaves its way into my house. May is when slowly there is a shift in the sense of anxiety and deadline. Calm enters the house and makes itself at home, rugged up in a blanket, on the couch. In some ways, it feels like I have been holding my breath for the first four months of the year and now I can exhale.
Gratitude seems to be the new black, if not in real life, certainly on social media. It is not a bad thing, fad or no fad. There are certainly many hashtags and many sites promoting our need to find gratitude in our every day. I have always embraced the idea of being thankful and finding that gratitude. Sometimes I forget how easy it is to get carried away with the superficial and the shiny, that stopping for a moment to be grateful can be a good way to find equilibrium again.
So I have decided to set myself a little challenge, nothing too impossible. Every day around three in the afternoon I always sit down to have a coffee. I usually sit and scroll through my social media or read the newspaper when I do. For the month of May, I am going to use this time instead to find something I am grateful for, whether it be that day or something far greater in my life. I will share my daily gratitude with you. No pressure to play along, but certainly feel free to join in if you want to.
I’ll post my daily gratitude on Facebook and Instagram, so make sure you follow along there to keep up with my #alwaysgrateful. Joining in can be as simple as leaving a comment or you can go ahead and post your own #alwaysgrateful – just use the hashtag or tag me so I can follow along too.
Either way, this is something I need to do. For a year that has started at a pace of a hundred miles an hour, I need to swing things back into equilibrium. I need to slow things down a little. I need to reconnect with the quiet and serenity that I had when I returned from my summer holiday. I seek to find balance and calm through gratitude and leave myself open to all the possibility that may come.
What are you grateful for today?
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