Day 3: Slice of Life

My slice, glimpse, peak into the mundane.... sounds easy enough. Every year, every day, I find it completely overwhelming to try to just find one slice per day, not a potpourri of every imaginable sliver.

Somehow I have gotten off the gratitude train. I have gotten pulled down by the muck and mire that is life. Many days I feel myself drowning as I slog through the sludge. When I take a minute to reflect, I think, "what happened to my intentional focus on gratitude?" What indeed. Somewhere, somehow, I just started slipping away from an intentional focus. I assumed it would naturally carry on. But the reality is that I know myself and I know that deeply ingrained in my psyche is a tendency to cry the victim, to succumb to a feeling of being beaten down. Gratitude is not second nature to me, it has to be practiced. So today I will make a choice. I will start small and find 3 things to be grateful for.

Today I am grateful that I can re-train my brain. This is small. This is ginormous. Because I can choose a focus and practice it, over and over and over, until new dendrites grow in my brain and retrain it. If I can do this, I can teach little people to do this. This leads to resilience and a sense that the circumstances that pull us down cannot defeat us, that it is just a circumstance, not who we are. I saw "we" because I know that it is necessary to model and teach this is to the community of 6 and 7 year olds whose daily outlook on life is deeply colored by my outlook on life.

Today I am grateful for my class family. They are simply amazing.

Today I am grateful that I have choices as to how I respond to whatever life might send my way.