About a month ago, my mother gave me a blank book as a gift, for use as a “gratitude journal.”
She’d heard a sermon about the importance of gratitude as a spiritual practice for becoming more conscious and intentional about the webs of personal connection and meaning that nourish our lives. Inspired, she bought me the journal and passed it along.
The gift was well-timed, because I’d also been reflecting on how to cultivate a greater sense of gratitude in myself and my family. Partially, I was wanting to help my kids see more clearly the webs of connection and community that sustain them. But I’d also begun to explore gratitude as part of my healing from Long COVID, having discovered that expressing gratitude for my bodily discomfort during meditation was the most-reliable way of relieving that discomfort.
Yes, you read that correctly: gratitude for my bodily discomfort. In other words, I don’t fight it: instead, I treat it as a messenger. If my head is aching, I lie down to meditate and mentally repeat, slowly:
Thank you, headache, reminding me: I need to rest.
Gradually, my headache will release, its call to rest having been honored.
So, when my mom gave me that blank book, I was well-disposed to take her advice and try gratitude journaling, and I’ve been at it for the past month.
Each night before bed, I write down the date and several things I’m grateful for from that day. Usually, I write down three things, but the number can vary. Some days, a big event draws my focus. Other days, I set out to write down three things, and in the act of beginning, I discover many more things besides, and I write those down, too.
At first, the gratitude journal was simply a part of my bedtime routine, but it quickly took on a bigger role in my life.
When I would meditate each morning as part of my Long COVID healing practice, my expressions of gratitude for my body soon were accompanied by recollections of things I’d written in my journal. So, I decided to do this more intentionally.
Now, each morning before I meditate, I re-read several pages from my gratitude journal. This has deepened the practice, and initiating each day in a spirit of interconnection with others has been especially important in helping me navigate the feelings of frustration and isolation that can accompany my experience of Long COVID.
All of that’s been nourishing on its own terms, but the impact this practice is beginning to have on my parenting is the reason I’m writing about it here. As it turns out, the gratitude journal has become a powerful tool for nourishing my own perception of my children.
For example, one of my kids is very high energy and does most things at peak intensity. When I’m weary with Long-COVID fatigue or anxious about over-extension, that energy can feel like a tornado storming through the house. In such moments, I feel an urge to treat the energy as a problem, to push it away and protect myself. I get impatient and feel as if I’m continuously trying to shut the lid on a box that’s overflowing and impossible to close.
But when I turn to my gratitude journal at the end of the day, I begin to recall this incredible energy differently. I feel awe and appreciation for its irrepressible spark and imagination. I remember how I cherish this aspect of my kid’s personality, even as it challenges me. I become disposed to help my kid channel that energy constructively and creatively, rather than push it away. Moreover, this kinder disposition carries into my daily waking life: not only do I recall it when I re-read my journal in the morning, but it comes to mind more readily during the course of the day, too.
I remember who I want to be.
I’m reminded of a beautiful essay I read recently by Gina Mikel Petrie, a professor of English as a Second Language at Eastern Washington University, about marrying for a second time and blending her and her new husband’s existing families into one. She describes the wariness and “taking sides” that often happened in the early days of her second marriage, as her children and step-children struggled to figure out what to make of each other and their new situation. She recalls the pain of wondering whether she and her step-children would ever feel completely at home together.
Petrie writes that her key turning point, following the advice of a friend, was deciding to “choose her vision” of her step-children.
For example, if getting the kids out of the house and off to school in the morning was a painful slog but culminated in a brief goodbye kiss from one of her step-children, then that kiss is what Petrie would choose to hold closest in memory.1 She did this because of how it transformed her own perception and disposition toward her step-children. As Petrie writes,
I choose the vision that brings about my acting towards the kids with love. I do this because that is who I want to be to the kids: someone who loves them.2
When I read this passage, I was deeply moved and inspired by it. I wanted to emulate it. But I also felt at a loss: what exactly could I do to cultivate this practice of “choosing the vision” is my own life?
As it turns out, my gratitude journal has become my medium for “choosing my vision”—not only my vision of my kids, but also my vision of the other people and situations that populate my day.
For example, perhaps I struggled to feel comfortable in a social gathering on a given day. When writing in my gratitude journal at night, I get to remember and hold in focus the particular people who took the time to come up to me and ask how I’m doing. By focusing with gratitude on these people and these moments, my memory of the event becomes a story of small kindnesses that shone light, rather than merely one more dreary story about social anxiety, and I become more free to approach those same people in the future.
Simply put, gratitude transforms my experience. I remember my awe before a rapidly-changing natural work or the simple functioning of my own body, and this remembering calls out in me the desire to tend these with care. I remember the gifts that others bring to my life, and this remembering calls out in me the desire to be a gift to them in turn.
And as a stay-at-home dad, these daily gifts are most abundant in relation with my kids, whose growing lives so powerfully orient my own, if only I take the time to hold these gifts in focus and acknowledge my need to offer the same.
Gina Mikal Petrie, “Kicking and Screaming (but Going Anyway),” in Chaos, Wonder and the Spiritual Adventure of Parenting, Sarah Conover & Tracy Springberry (Eds.), Boston, MA: Skinner House Books, 2011, pg. 115.
Ibid., pg. 116.