Well hello again, dear friends and fellow revolutionaries-in-training! ’Tis I, your friendly neighborhood Lila, returning from yet another trip around the sun and prepping for a new wild adventure! How y’all doing? Hopefully you are all safe, healthy, and happy and, if not, hopefully brighter days head your way soon!
So, recently I was watching this video from Seo at the channel tbhstudying that’s all about if we’re doing gratitude journaling wrong. It’s a really great video in which Seo shares her personal experience with gratitude journaling, alongside some scientific findings, and suggests a slight tweak to the practice. The modification she suggests is what I would call “active gratitude.” That is, instead of only writing down what we are grateful for, we should also engage in showing others and the world our gratitude through our words and actions. Suffice to say, I wholeheartedly agree with her!
I’ve kinda alluded to this before, but one of the things I find really frustrating about American culture is the sense of individualism and the entitlement that comes with it. When we think of ourselves as only ourselves (as opposed to thinking of ourselves as part of a worldwide interconnected communal web of sorts) we tend to think of everything we receive in life as for us. We think less about the giving, and even less about how we could continue that giving. But what Seo suggests in her video is kinda the antithesis of that. Because if we are truly grateful for what we have, shouldn’t we want to share it with others? I certainly think so.
I’ve always had a hard time with gratitude journaling for similar reasons to Seo—it seems too…insular? So, I love the idea of making gratitude an act. Not just a simple “Thanks” and a hug, though, but rather a tradition of giving that may just start a chain reaction. That’s why I think from 2024 onward, I’d like to partake in the revolutionary act of active gratitude, and I hope you’ll join me!
Well, that’s all I got for ya today, friends. Stay colorful!
PLEASE NOTE:
This post is a re-post from my Substack.
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