Gratitude

This week’s gratitude - it’s been 358 weeks since I started doing these.

So there’s a low effort but still useful way of doing gratitude by ‘looking around’ (My tea is refreshing, my desk is at exactly the right height, my socks are the very definition of comfortable), that I slip into sometimes. There’s a way that is a disguised way of telling people how great you are (“I’m profoundly grateful that I worked extremely hard to be declared ‘most handsome man’ in a crowded field”), or how much of a victim you are. I constantly end up doing these last two - particularly my first drafts!

The gratitude I try and do is: these, named where possible, humans helped make my life better, particularly at times when I was doing something I was worried or embarrassed about. That can be tricky, because sometimes I sit down on a Wednesday and realise that for the last week I did very little reaching out about anything that I cared about. Sometimes I’m sitting there thinking about what an awfully closed week I had.

So, this week I am grateful to:

• Liz who was, as always, an extremely human connection in a difficult day
• Everybody I rang in a panic on last Friday before discovering that ‘it was perfectly normal’
• The people I emailed last week who collectively donated £845.25 to Flowers for Turing before it has officially even opened. (I’m late, I need to get on that)
• Everybody I caught up with at H’s birthday party last week. Lots of people I met 25 years ago, which is a wonderful sentence to be able to write
• Leo wanting a ‘lovely cuddle’ to go to sleep