Gratitude Journal #16
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.
Just barely making it in under the wire with this one. And this week, I do not have the excuse of wanting to wait until I got my train ride in, in order to be grateful for observation cars. No, this week, I just have not sat down to write. But I am grateful, for many things. Of course, we are getting to the point of me having written about being grateful for enough things that I need to go back through all my previous posts, almost every week, to see if I have been grateful for something in the past. I really need to create a list of all the things I have been grateful for. I know that future me will be grateful for it.
But in the meantime, here is what I am grateful for this week.
Gratitude Entry #36 –
Colleagues
Last week, I wrote that I was grateful for professional development
opportunities, and that is absolutely true. But even more than that, I am
grateful for amazing colleagues with whom to share those experiences, and to
learn from, as we each take different lessons away from the same talk, or to
sometimes help contextualize the experience.
I was lucky enough that three other administrators from my college were with me
at the conference. We spent quite a bit of time together, and often coordinated
schedules when there were multiple talks in one session that we all wanted to
attend. We would divide and conquer and share our notes afterwards. In addition,
our administrators’ group has a monthly reading group. We read a few chapters
in a book (currently Crucial Conversations) or articles that we think may help
or provide guidance with some of the issues we are facing, and then we get together
once a month to talk about what we have read and how it applies to our work.
And sometimes those conversations go off on tangents about other issues we are struggling
with, in order to get perspective and advice from each other.
I love my department, my faculty, my staff, and my students. I am incredibly
happy to be where I am, but it really is made ever so much better by having a
wonderful set of colleagues who understand the challenges and the rewards.
Gratitude Entry #37 – Online D&D
I am a gamer. I have been playing Dungeons and Dragons since 3rd grade. (Not very well at the time, and I probably spent more time annoying my brother than actually playing, but that is still when I start this from.) And most of the people I was friends with in high school and college, and who I am still friends with, it was because we played D&D or other tabletop role playing games together. We have as many stories about situations our characters were in together as we do about situations we were actually in together. And it is great.
As an adult, though, it can be a lot harder to find a time to sit down and dedicate 4 hours or more to a game. We all have a lot more responsibilities and demands on our time than we did in our late teens and early twenties. And some of us live in completely different time zones – literally on the other side of the world. And yet, we all also still enjoy role playing together and wanting that shared experience.
And so, like video phone calls, which I have been grateful for before, there are now online tools that let you all play D&D (or other RPGs) together, with a Game Master, each from the comfort of our own homes, no matter where those homes are.
We use the video chat technology to talk to each other, and an online tool built specifically for playing role playing games, to manage fights and dice rolling. Just like around someone’s dining room table, some sessions are all about the fighting and some sessions are heavy role play. But, unlike having to all gather around one person’s dining room table, we have people from Seattle and Stockholm with a few stops in between. We have people who can cuddle their dogs, while the person who is allergic to dogs makes their plans. And parents can still be home to help with the kids.
I have my group of friends because of role playing games. I am so grateful that there are now tools that let us continue to play together, even though our lives are so very different from when we first met.
