These are wonderful, and thank you Ms. Spock for your daily list. I personally love lists for to-do purposes because my brain tends to become scattered and I find them soothing. IF they're mine. I was married to someone who made lists FOR me, which was just flirting with death if you ask me.
Yesterday I only got in a partial meditation, because I allowed me head to wander when I had plenty of time to do it. This is a problem for me, and with SO much negativity around the outskirts of my life at the moment, it's just far too easy to keep allowing myself ths stupid luxury of 'going there'. I'm BIG on an awful lot of life's perspective being choice, it just plain is and I really CAN choose how I spend the next 10, 20 or 30 minutes, much less 2 hours. I can choose to meditate, discipline my head correctly, or have the rather pitiful luxury of reflecting on all the cr*ppy things everyone's done to me. They really HAVE but that and a nickle doesn't buy me one, single thing other than a wasted hour. Nothing. Boo Hoo poor me, look how dreadfully they've all treated me, and then what? You get a parade? Nope. You get nothing, unless the dog likes you. So, all the 'theys' will win anyway unless I choose NOT to feel pitiful. It's that easy, or tough ( because it sounds a little ruthless, you're just being ruthless with yourself, not hurting anyone ), a choice by the minute sometimes.
So there's my journaling a positive experience. It didn't start out that way, it's just that the resolve to disallow this ridiculous slide into self-pity is indeed a positive experience. Or maybe the I'm genetically programmed through the whole Scottish thing to suffer and like it, who knows.
I'm grateful I can get this far saying some things ' out loud ', like positive experiences, or even listing kindnesses. It's a good idea maybe going into the PM, but it does feel the same, like it's taboo to mention anything ' nice ' coming from myself. It's VERY, very wierd for me. I have NO idea why, since in some ways you can't dent the sense of self my parents must have instilled, which enabled me to escape the abuser all those years ago. In others? I don't deserve anything, much less anything to BE grateful for or positive experiences or am a nice enough person to note my kindnesses to others. These elements are bone deep, PTSD which I allowed to permeate the entire skelaton despite what I thought of as therapy. So now I'm truly grateful I can even write this stuff, for REAL.
Grateful I'll have 3 of the 4 kids through college soon, the second on to grad school, some school is paying her to go get her PHd. Please, please know I'm not bragging, I NEED somewhere I can write this and there's simply nowhere I can say this. I'm desperately hoping maybe I did something right to have children who have turned out well enough to succeed this far like they have. No one out here thinks I did, God knows I do not, like it'd be fluke. The 14 year old isn't there yet. Hope he will also. It's just a 'thing' out here, how could dumb, flaky, incompetent Annie be the one to have 4 kids all go through college, with some through grad school? The son with the Master's is doing screamingly well in AI, robotics. The kids have DONE all this allllll by themselves, God knows I can't even read one of their thesis's when they proudly hand the thing to me. The word 'The' appears once in awhile, I'll point to that with relief. Still, some little thing in my head stubbornly says surely, surely this has to have some little thing to do with ME, as a parents and a single one. Anyway, I am SO, so grateful she's graduating, with honors in Chemistry, very soon. I am SO sorry, for real, if this sounds like bragging. It sincerely is not, I simply do not have anywhere or anyone else to tell.
I'm grateful my daughter and her boyfriend will be going to school in the same city, so she won't be alone.
I'm grateful for this forum, no one said we couldn't be grateful for the same thing every day. Once again I'm grateful for the folks who got me back here and always will be. It's that 'worthy' thing. I'm simply not used to being/feeling important enough to anyone to imagine they'd come and get me like that.
My act of kindness was to make sure we got to my daughter's school yesterday, to be there for her last chorus concert. That was a little tough, since I've been watching that little face on stages since 3rd grade, there won't BE anymore concerts. For her sake, I didn't avoid this last one and I could have. I'll include my husband too, since he had a ton of work to do and put it aside to be there. I can't drive at night, so he made sure I was able to go, isn't he a PEACH?
I did my daily shuffle/jog/run, not quite 3 miles yesterday.
Alba, my father had a series of home health care visitors in the last years. Mom and I were just talking about this the other day, the ones who were SUCH good friends after awhile or even a short time. They gave Dad his dignity back by treating him like a MAN again and would consistantly do the kind of thing you just described, popping in with something they heard him talk about like baked apples with brown sugar or homemade teaberry wine or whatever. They also were pretty protective, gosh it was nice to have them around.
