Online or on paper, I suggest making a version of this not-exactly-gratitude journal.
Gratitude journals have been a common theme in the self-help articles of the recent past. Write down the good stuff when you wake up or go to bed, authors tell us. Some especially optimistic writers even suggest that humans can reset themselves emotionally by focusing on the good and taking time to record the details.
Ummm… maybe, maybe not. Other people with letters behind their names write short pieces documenting that this approach does not solve the problem of depression, for example. We are enamored of simple fixes, one reason why the COVID-19 time has left many of us — although not the President it seems — at a loss. Where are our simple fixes? But this is not a coronavirus post, except in the sense that I wish to offer a possible activity to those sheltering at home.
I created a journal awhile back that I like better than the standard gratitude journal. The picture above shows my approach. I write the good, the bad and the indifferent. In the right circumstances, I might even add the column “ugly.”
I emphasize the good, but I put down the high points of what is not working. I also make a note of those parts of my environment that may be material but that are not doing much to my seratonin levels one way or another. A few examples: One hour flight delay, hair needs roots done, Papers everywhere. Here’s one clearly real time entry: “Don’t have a clue what is going on on Perry Mason. :-)”
Why I am recommending this journal: I never reread gratitude journals. Those scribblings don’t reflect my life. Yes, I liked my trip to the garden and the Leonida’s chocolates, but somehow rereading those facts holds little interest. When I add the bad and the indifferent, though, I get a true slice of life. The left carotid endarterectomy was bad, but the cardiac and ICU nurses were good, and I was indifferent to six days in Glenbrook hospital, only one of which totally sucked. I liked my Indian dinner that week. I loved visiting with Abby and EJ. On another day when I was tired of turkey and had tinnitus, I enjoyed reading “A Porcupine Named Fluffy” to the class I subbed in Lincolnshire.
The texture of my life is captured in the pages of this journal, and my indifference to the sump pump repair during the bad time of the broken toe brings the picture back to me much more vividly than any gratitude journal might do. This journal is fast to write, too. “Parents happy. Nice Costco pizza lunch” says enough.
Throw a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies journal into your next Amazon order, reader? Or whatever journal reflects you? If you want to use a Word or Excel document instead, that works perfectly. I sometimes print those pages and staple them into the physical journal.
Hugs from the Blue Room. J
