2023 Gratitude Series: Prologue

Early in my blogging years, I used to post a list of gratitudes on or near Thanksgiving Day. Typically the list revolved around the standard items in my life at the time: family, friends, food, having a car, a computer, etc. Oh yes, and cats. Sometime after I graduated from college, I stopped. I don’t really have a reason why I stopped (or started, for that matter). Nor do I really have a solid reason for not restarting this tradition once I restarted blogging, except that my focus was different. Perhaps sharing my list of gratitudes was my way of expressing a part of what I had understood to be my faith at the time. I’ll never really know.

During the years when I didn’t blog, I had a close friend with whom we developed a regular habit of sharing our gratitudes to each other, which we did on a weekly basis. Our challenge to ourselves and to each other was to come up with five. That was pretty much not a problem, and sometimes we would even exceed the requisite five. Considering that I was still struggling with a lot of things in life at the time, developing a habit of gratitude-giving (which, admittedly, I’ve lapsed on it repeatedly) helped me begin to develop that muscle of taking my mind off whatever it was that I was feeling or thinking about that was perhaps not good.

Another backstory component to what I wish to do with this Gratitude Series this fall/winter season is that, again back when I was in college, in a separate journal, I used to write stories about how I met and came to become friends with each of the significant friends I had at the time. It was a really nice exercise and yet another form of gratitude. And yet, as time has passed by, I’ve gone through more circles of friends and other colleagues and acquaintances and not really stopped in the same way to take stock of the people I’ve come to have known over the last ten years or so. So I will attempt to do that now.

One caveat for the reader that I must bring up, is that, true to the form I’ve adopted in my blogging over the last several years, I cannot identify these friends by name. Sure, part of this is for security reasons. I’ve posted stuff (opinions, primarily) over the last several years that, if the wrong person were to come across this page, I could get censored, shut down, or worse. But the other part is that, with at least some of these friendships, some of my experiences with certain individuals could be confidential in nature. The truth is, I met some of my friends while in therapy. I’m not about to “out” them in this regard.

Also in this regard, is the reason I’m finding myself quite grateful for the “Faraway State of Mind” story series. Especially in the last two stories I wrote last year, I’ve drawn inspiration for certain characters from some of these friends for whom I personally (albeit cryptically) wish to share my gratitude. As such, I will happily use some of these characters as a front to allow myself to share more of how I came to know them, as well as how God has used them in my life (and hopefully how He has used me in their lives as well).