I hope everyone had a wonderful Easter weekend! During our conversation journaling exercises this month, a recurring feeling I wanted to have for my day was gratitude. In my submission to Dean Mather, I mentioned how I truly believe that recognizing what you are grateful for helps you with happiness and growth. I want to be more consistent with practicing gratitude. It can be as easy as writing down 5 things you are grateful for everyday, and I find noticeable changes in my mindset and outlook. I feel grateful that I took the entire weekend away to spend time with my family for Easter.
The first thing I write down is always my family. My sister is my lifelong best friend. I don’t get to hang out with her often because she lives in the Bay Area of California, but we have plans to move to New York City together once I graduate. We used to play tennis almost everyday, and I miss always having a partner. I was the one who always wanted to play and would sometimes force her to come out.
I’m grateful that I have a lifelong tennis partner as well, even though we are separated at the moment. However, I realized it’s not good to only ever play against one person in tennis because I have perfected my hits against hers and feel less comfortable with anyone else’s balls. My mom wanted me to become a a professional tennis player which is crazy, but I only started liking the sport when I joined my high school team and started playing for fun with great girls. I do miss when I was training and winning every day in middle school though.
I am also grateful for my friends here at Penn State. Some of my friends are great tennis players and some had never picked up a racket before, but everyone is always eager to play or for me to teach them. I feel basic when I say I love to play tennis with friends and family in my free time, but it is genuinely a must for an ideal day. I figured out through many interviews for various fun and professional things that answers come easily to me when I spend time practicing gratitude and reflection. It is much easier for me to be authentic and passionate just talking about what truly excites me that I have tuned into.
I am always grateful. Everyday is like Thanksgiving!!!
Hi Megan! Great post. I often find myself reflecting in deep thought on gratitude as well. I like the idea of writing down five things every day. What’s funny, is I often tend to have gratitude when very great things happen. I reflect on how thankful I am that that situation or experience may have occurred and the impact it left. Something, I have been trying to work on however is having gratitude even through tough moments. Here, we learn and appreciate the struggle that might be a grievance at the time, yet it turns out to be the special thing we call learning. That is what makes life special!
Hi Megan! It’s so nice to hear about your attitude of gratitude. It is a feeling that I very often tap into on my worst days. If I can find even a few things to be grateful for on my worst days, I can usually go to bed with some feelings of positivity. The BISCI3 class I TA’d for taught me a lot about looking for gratitude in nature, something I still value to this day. On the days where I feel like I’m fed up or can’t communicate with other people in general, I’ll often find some small patch of nature and try to be grateful for its smallest aspects: a blade of grass, a speck of dirt, or an ant marching by. It often centers me and infuses a new positivity into my day!