Nora: Hi, everyone! This week Lily and I decided that we should write down five things that we were grateful for each day. Recently, it’s been a little hard to find many positives in life, so we thought that pointing to specific things that make us happy would help cheer us up. It actually got pretty difficult once we got toward the end of the week because I was running out of the more generic things, like my family and friends. This exercise forced me to get pretty specific and find the joy in the small things that I normally take for granted.
Here are a few things that I wrote:
On Sunday I said that I was grateful for my planner because I was getting ready for the week ahead and writing down what I had to do in the upcoming days helped me feel organized and put-together.
On Tuesday I wrote that I was grateful for asynchronous days because I had had a really busy two days and was super excited to slow down and have the whole next day to catch up on sleep and work.
On Wednesday I said that I was thankful that we are able to attend school in person. I was reflecting on how far we’ve come since the beginning of the pandemic and also how fortunate we in the Holton community are to be able to have some sense of normalcy back.
On Friday I wrote that I was grateful for the upcoming weekend. This was a pretty easy one to think of because I am always looking forward to the weekend, but it was still nice to acknowledge it.
I think that writing down gratitudes for each day is a great practice. Five might be hard to come up with, especially now, but even thinking of one a day would help anyone find a little more joy and appreciation in their life.
Lily: Sometimes it's really easy for me to get sucked into the stress of school and forget to appreciate the things around me. The simple exercise of writing down five things I'm grateful for has helped me ground myself in the middle of busy times. I started the week writing down somewhat generic things I'm grateful for like friends, family and school. Although I'm always grateful for them, I'm glad throughout the week I pushed myself to select things that were unique to my day. Some of my personal favorite gratitudes for the week were candy from [Upper School Director] Mr. [Chris] Lynch, getting to eat inside one day, my teacher moving our test, and my mom baking. These are things that I usually wouldn't think about, but getting the opportunity to reflect on them revealed how much they mean to me.
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