Thinking Out LoudHow do you unwind after a full, demanding year?
For me, it’s usually a mix of getting away on holiday, before taking some time to look back on the year that was, to recalibrate my perspective.
It’s a practice I started during a particularly difficult season, when I felt caught between a lingering exhaustion from the year just gone and a quiet dread of the year ahead. So, I sat down with a large piece of paper (and my beloved pens and highlighters) and decided to mind-map everything I was thankful for. Which to be honest wasn’t much.
I sat there for a good forty minutes in the discomfort, waiting for something to shift.
Until slowly … one by one … a whole range of things started to come back into focus. Friendships. Opportunities. Valuable experiences. Skills I’d grown in. Material blessings I’d taken for granted. It took a couple of hours, but by the end I had a page full of honest gratitude.
There’s something about thankfulness that is profoundly countercultural.
In a world full of screens demanding our attention, the temptation is to self-soothe with our distraction of choice, and then rinse and repeat – another day, another week, another year. We become preoccupied and numb to all we’ve been given.
This year, when I pull out the paper and pens again, I don’t expect it to be as transformative as that first time. But every time, I marvel at how sitting down to deliberately cultivate a thankful heart – to map the fingerprints of God, the gift giver, on my life – restores me in my weariness.
I hope you get an opportunity in the weeks ahead to reflect on the good things in your own life, whether obvious or not, and to embrace the quiet discipline of thankfulness.
This Thinking Out Loud was first published on Facebook.