Gratitude Journal #5
Apparently, you can train your brain to be happier by keeping a gratitude journal, so I am giving it a go. My goal is post about 100 things I am grateful for over the course of the year. (This should average out to just a little over 2/week.) However, I am going to try and stay away from the standard family/friends/pets. Please know I absolutely am grateful for my family, friends, and pets. I would not have made it through the past couple of year without each of them. But if I am trying to train myself to be happier, then I want to start recognizing the smaller things in life that I am grateful for.
I have fallen way behind on my gratitude journal – not because I am not grateful for things or even because I have not been thinking about it, but mostly because my schedule has been disrupted for the past few weeks, and I am a creature of habit. My executive functioning skills suffer when I am not on my regular schedule. And that means the bonus things, like writing blog posts, get cast aside so I can focus on the necessary things, like doing my job.
As for why my schedule was disrupted, well, the Seattle area saw the heaviest snowfall in 70 years over the last two weeks, and the most snow in a February ever. For the record, Seattle is not built for snow. We are a lot like San Francisco, which means we are a city on a hill, or really, lots and lots of hills. We are also a city that does not see snow, and certainly not snow and below freezing temperatures for two weeks in a row, at least not often enough that there is a point to be prepared for it.
Truthfully, everything I am grateful for in the last two weeks really focuses around the winter weather.
Gratitude Entry #5 – Our Garage
Our car gets to live in a garage. That means that if we want to drive the car in winter weather, we do not have to start the process by clearing snow off the car or scraping windshields, or giving it 15 minutes to warm up. The car is safely in the garage, which is colder than the house, but there is no snow and no frost, and the car starts just fine.
Gratitude Entry #6 – Ability to Work from Home
Of course, if the roads are really bad, while having the garage is nice, you do not actually want to drive. My campus closed for 4 days due to the weather over the last 2 weeks. Instead of having to take unpaid time off or use vacation or sick time, and then scramble to get all of my work done in the days campus was operational, I was able to work from home. I could remote into my work desktop and have access to all of my files. In some ways, it was better than working in the office because I had a lot fewer distractions and was able to really focus on some detail oriented work.
Plus, my terrier hung out with me in the home office, so I was not alone, and had pretty cute company.
Gratitude Entry #7 – Decent Bus Service
Even when the main roads are clear, that does not mean the side streets and residential streets are, which means it can be pretty difficult to get back to work once the city starts to function again if you lived on less well traveled roads. Cue bus service.
Truthfully, I bus to work most days. I prefer not to pay tolls or fight traffic. On the bus, I listen to music and read, or listen to audio books and play Candy Crush. I can decompress from the day at work without getting frustrated by the guy in front of me whose turn signal has been on for the last 2 miles with no where to go, or the woman in lane next to me who cut over without the use of her turn signal.
And on days when the roads are bad, it is even nicer to know that someone else is doing the driving. Someone else has snow tires on, and knows the best routes to get from one place to another. The walk to the bus stop is not always the easiest (no one likes walking through slush), but it is easier and safer than trying to drive on those roads.
Gratitude Entry #8 – Great Neighbors
When the neighborhood road is bad, and busing is not an option. It pays to have great neighbors. The city we moved to this winter is like a small town set down in the middle of the Seattle metropolitan area. Seriously, on Christmas Eve, the police were out directing traffic in front of the Catholic church so that people could easily get in and out for Christmas Eve Mass.
Over half of the people in our new cul-de-sac have said hi and introduced themselves since we moved in. And last week, when my husband had an important appointment in the middle of the day (when the busses that run by our house do not run), a couple of the neighbors helped him shovel the street from our driveway to the better traveled cross street, so that he could get where he was going.
