A while back, there was a fad for keeping a gratitude journal. It didn’t last long. People’s grateful imagination was not well-developed. One dropout wrote that he was tired of being thankful for his cat. Even my own energy for gratitude, I have been doing for years, was flagging. In these challenging times
I took some training in teaching journalling a fw years ago. The training offered a variety of prompts to ensure that your journal isn’t just “yesterday I saw, I thought I heard, I watched…today I plan to ….). I adapted one of the prompts, the alphabet poem, to gratitude with surprisingly good results.
The alphabet poem starts with writing in the margin the 26 letters of the alphabet down the side of the page.When you come to X, you can cheat with a word staring with ex,, because the e is more or less silent. The letter in the margin starts the first word of each line of a poem. Free verse is fine; it ,doesn’t have to rhyme. You can have one word per line lone, which is hard, or you can write several words on some and one on others. You can use other poem starters,like your name,, or just a nice longish word, like beautiful or happiness or democracy. Try it, It’s fun.
So how does it adapt to gratitude? Start by writing down your gratitude with A on the first day and think of three things you are grateful for that begin with A. Apples, ancestors, America, asparagus, adults, animals. I am now on the letter T and so far have been thankful for such oddities as radio, Celts (my ancestors), poetry, rainbows, and Stoicism.
Gratitude is always a good way to start and/or end your day. Acknowledging gratitude is a good antidote to all seven of the deadly sins (pride, greed, sloth, anger, gluttony, envy and lust, in case you don’t keep a list handy) and replacing them with humility, generosity, patience, joy, trust, moderation, and compassion. (And also constructive action, the antithesis of sloth, but that’s for the next blog). Keep that latter list handy to use when you come to the letters c, g, h, j, m, p and t.
PurpleSage41 
I like that. Journalling can have different formats or purposes. My grandfather’s two volumes (1925-1966) were written in repurposed student notebooks; he had studies in Germany abd the first pages were obviously from those days. Those volumes are tight-packed with events of the day: bird sightings, what came up in his gardens, how impassable Cream Hill Road was in the spring, stuu like that; you’d have to be a naturist, like him, to wade into it. Entries for the journals of his father, WCG, who was a UUC minister, likely became the subjects of his 2K sermons delivered and hymns written over his lifetime, like Home, Peace & Union, Onward & Upward, Farewell, Forrest, God Ever Is Good, The Sparrow’s Fall, The House Beautiful, A Recipe For Good Cheer, Culture Without College, Of Faces and Their Making et al. My Dad’s journals were little spiral notebooks full of trivia. Mine are abbreviated: What Am I Doing, Thinking, Researching; they fill a boatful.
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What a treasure to leave behind! I have my mother’s journals, somewhat intermittent but a good way to keep her memory alive.
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Agreed. I have been wondering what to do with them. Several of his grandchildren are writing a wikipedia entry for him. How to mention or capsulize all that data in a meaningful, documentable way? To scan and publish it is expensive and would have to have a commensurately meaningful end. A biography? who is to write it? Two PhD theses were written for his father WCG but is LSG so worthy? A new 656 page book is about to be published by S&S in which LSG plays an important part. Will that catapult his legacy? His journals demonstrate (for me) he was a man-of-all-seasons, meaning, his interests were about the “things” which mattered most to him. LSG’s newspaper column had a title which exemplified his broad vision: Books and Things.
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