100 Days of Gratitude

Gratitude....................

I decided a couple of weeks ago to embark on 100 days of gratitude and post it to my face book status every day. I chose this forum not so that others could see it, but simply to keep me accountable as someone may notice if I missed a day and I really wanted to swing the balance in favour of a positive focus in my life.
So far it has been an interesting journey, sitting at the end of my day and considering what I am grateful for. Although I guess there are many things that I am grateful for, I have taken to just sitting and seeing what the first thing is that pops into my mind. As a generally positive person I have found it not too much of a challenge but as a human being ( or a spiritual being having a human experience says the 'hippy chic' in my head!!) there are days that I have struggled to grab hold of some gratitude. These are the days when something unexpected has just jumped up and bitten me in life, we all have those but this exercise has made me more aware of how much influence a moment can have and how long it can last. On those days I have been tempted to simply put 'today I am grateful that the day is over!' but then I stop and ask 'am I ? Is that it?!' And I have honestly found that once I release that moment and dig a little deeper, there has been a lesson for me lurking in the muck and once I acknowledge the lesson then the heaviness seems to lighten and the feeling that everything is crap seems to clear a little more quickly. And so I wonder if this is the next big thing in my life, is this another light bulb moment? (Really, soon I will have had so many 'lightbulb moments' I will be internally lit up like Time Square on New Years Eve!)
Whatever it is, this process of focusing on gratitude is a positive step in my life, it is making me slow a little, even if only for a moment, and smell the roses (or smell the gratitude??) and keeping a positive light shining even on my darkest days and while it is absolutely ok for me to have a bad day, I am now grateful for that too as how can we appreciate the light if we haven't known the darkness?