When I began my recovery work on the 12 Steps many years ago, my first sponsor told me I needed to develop an attitude of gratitude. She was right. The fact was I was extremely ungrateful in just about every area of my life back then. Today, that’s definitely not the case, but it took me a lot of work to get there.
That path of me learning to be grateful actually started with a gratitude journal. My sponsor suggested I write five things in it each day that I could be grateful for. At first that proved to be quite difficult because my brain was so focused on being negative and ungrateful. Initially, all I could think of were the big things I had such as food, water, shelter, clothes, money, etc. As time went on though, my repetition of writing things down like that each day began to change my attitude in life. I started finding gratitude in many other ways and began seeing things happening all the time around me that I could feel that way about. Ironically, I know today that those things were always around me. I just couldn’t see them back then because I usually focused on what I didn’t have versus what I did. Thankfully that gratitude journal was the catalyst to get me there.
Don’t get me wrong, there have a number of days when I’ve had high levels of physical pain or when everything seemed to be falling apart, where I struggled to maintain that attitude of gratitude. Regardless of how bad I ever felt on those days though, I never stopped writing down those five things I was grateful for. Trust me, I often wanted to, but I never did. I know that recovery is all about doing the things that are healthy for you when you want to, and even when you don’t want to. It’s really all about consistency and I know that’s helped when I’ve had those types of days.
It’s been seven years now since I began my gratitude journal and now I find myself writing at least eleven things each day that I’m grateful for. While this exercise used to take me much longer to do, I can now complete it in just a few minutes. Developing my attitude of gratitude took a lot of work. It’s not something I did here or there as that action only got me temporary results. It’s something I had to practice each and every day. In doing so, my attitude has truly changed in life, as I am so much more grateful in it than I ever used to be…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson