Gratitude with Attitude

New phone

Shallow, but today I’m thankful for my new whizzy smartphone (Galaxy II, if you must know) and being able to get onto the interwebs anywhere. Will this mean more posts? Only time will tell!

Sweet Music

My commute to work from the in-laws is about an hour, most of which is one long bus ride. This gives me just enough time to enjoy an album (~45 mins) each way and has given me plenty of time to catch up on my music collection. This, along with 6 months of working from home, has helped get my passion for good music back up to former levels. It’s also been good for my last.fm scrobbling ;)

My wonderful wife

Had a hard week. Homesickness meets sick-of-not-having-a-homeness. Lost myself in work a bit too hard, and kinda ran out of juice. I’m therefore thankful today for my wonderful wife; she pulled me out of a hole today.

Cool career

Software development, done badly can be a thankless task, a crawl through brambles and just a royal pain.

Nonetheless I give thanks today that I have a job that allows me to build, design and construct “cool technical stuff”. It really is a creative job at it’s best, involves problem-solving and different every day.

Compared to the clock-watching and poor pay of my time as a till jockey for a certain upmarket John Lewis associated supermarket chain, it really is a pretty cool career to be in.

Perseverance

I may not have much sometimes, but perseverance has taken me through some epic times both good, hard and bad. Right now, it’s all three - good times with a new job (couldn’t of got here without many years of perseverance to my craft), hard times (going through a cold, and a bit of a crunch finishing older projects whilst starting 9-5 work) and bad (renovations, will they ever end ?)

Annoyingly thought I had a great quote for this, but realise it was for it’s cousin, Persistence. But nonetheless, it’s one of my touchstones for keeping on keeping on :

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

- Calvin Coolidge

Regret-free choices

I regret too much. Hindsight does that to me - how much stuff I have paid money for, especially in my younger years, and then done nothing with. Impulse purchase, wasted money, filling my house with cr*p. Self-hate spiral coming here…

So today I’m grateful for buying a playstation. I’d just got my student loan in my 1st year of university, and immediately spent 25% of it on a brand new Sony Playstation with Wipeout 2097, Tomb Raider and Tekken. Three classic games of the platform, I’d argue, and all gaming franchises that are still going.

Anyway, the point is I bought it, I had excellent fun with it, played it to death without spending too much on new games (probably only bought about 20 all in) lent it to friends when I went travelling / on holiday, and gave it to charity when I picked up a PS 2 about 7-8 years later.

What an awesome impulse purchase that was :)

Good friends

Got two job offers today, and promptly had a life-crisis. Not the expected reaction. Thank god for good friends and talk. Talked things into perspective, calmed the crazy emotions, and turned panic into empowerment. Hope it holds :)

Gift of the gabbling

Today was a day of two interviews - so I’m thankful for being able to talk my way through such things in fine style ! Gabbed my way through both, and have a confident feeling about both.

Surviving

I survived cancer. I often take that for granted, day-by-day it felt quite manageable. But just as there were a few really bad days where I wondered my the fuck it happened to me, and when the eventual bad news was going to come, there are now the occasional days such as today where I feel good, elated, alive and thankful for the shift in perception that such an event forces you to adopt. And I think how wonderfully awesome lucky I am right now, for so many things, but all things I have so many more years (days ! Hours !) to enjoy thanks to my recovery. The sort of things I’d taken for granted for many years before

Gratitude: Reloaded

Think I took a wrong step somewhere with this blog. Which I’m fine with, but wanted to fix it rather than abandon it.

So I’m making myself a few guidelines to hopefully steer me back on course with where I wanted it to go…

1. Minimum number of words = 1. Doesn’t need to be long, just long enough
2. I’m writing for myself. This is public - that’s how I want it to be, as I feel the public element helps sustain the habit. But I’m writing for me, from the inside, not explain to the world from the outside
3. Daily thanks. With the two restrictions (or relaxations), try to make it daily. The goal is to train the mind to focus on the positive of life, not the negative.

Life is awesome RIGHT NOW for everyone, if you have the power to simply believe it. It’s really that simple. But like all things simple, it’s really hard in practice :)