Gratitude Friday 12 26 25 The Final Weekly Gratitude Post for Now

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” ― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

I have been writing these weekly posts for five years and two months. This end of year post seems like a good stopping point for now. I am going to take a break and no longer post weekly. It has been a rewarding process for me. I practiced writing and learned a great deal along the way. One gets better at anything they practice consistently. 268 posts in total and about 134,000 words. It has been a worthy focus of time. On reflection again, it was worth the effort.

For me, writing helps me think more deeply on a topic. This may seem old fashioned as AI and ChatGPT allow people to get instantaneous, personalized and pleasing summaries of information across billions of sources. This capability can be really valuable as a tool with significant drawbacks. Having a lot of data is not the same as contemplating the information and processing what it means, which takes focus and effort. Having data is not learning. Our brains connect and retain things when we spend time considering it. Writing helps me stay curious and consider nuances of a topic. Doing so quite often led me to deeper understanding and appreciation for things I would not have otherwise valued. I hope people find ways to sustain deep thinking and introspection in a world that is increasingly outsourcing the tools we use to see and shape our world. So at least for me, although I will take a break from the weekly gratitude posts, the process I used to reflect, investigate, write and consider is one I plan to keep using as I devote more of my writing time to focus on addiction and recovery themes.

A reflection on topics over the course of the years:

·        Recovery - Regular practice of gratitude is a valuable tool for recovery and helped me with what I term my Eeyore brain. Are brains wire based on what we think and what we do, so we should look in the direction we want to go, not at the potholes along the way…

·        Music - I love music, and over the years it has been a regular focus. Not everyone feels strongly about music, but it is important to me. One of the things I learned over the course of the blog is that people access memory differently. There is wide variation. Some people associate memory and music, so when they hear a song, it accesses stored memory. This is my experience and perhaps one of the reasons I love music so very much.

·        Travel - Travel can change lives. Experiencing new things can help us keep “child’s eye,” the eye that sees a world of wonder. It is healthy to travel and to remind ourselves what an amazing world we live in. I value seeing the world with fresh eyes. Travel helps with that. I hope to have more travel on the road ahead, but no one of us really knows our future. Pictured above is a favorite place on Mainland Orkney, Scotland that has been inhabited for 5,525.

·        History - History does not repeat, but it does echo. We need to understand where we have come from to consider where we are and where the road we travel will take us. Many weeks I delved into a historical date associated with the Friday I was posting and learned so much by doing so.

·        The Human Experience – Failures have a funny way of becoming important for progress, things come around in ways that can be near impossible to predict. It was a regular focus of this weekly post. It makes each day more important. Additionally, there is nothing that is mundane in a finite world. Life is finite. 100 years from now we will all be gone. We have no idea when our expiration date is or what tomorrow holds for us.

This blog was never super popular. There may have been 50 regular readers. I never promoted it or focused any energy at all in getting it widely circulated. That was not my purpose here. I never actually cared about that, the benefit for me was the practice not the “likes.” I have written weekly here as it has been rewarding for me. If no one read it, I am not sure it would have stopped me sooner.

So here we are at the cusp of 2026. What shall it yield for us? I have high hopes for the New Year ahead. Some travel, some work accomplishment and time enjoying the small things. In reflection there are no small things. One of the lessons I have learned thus far in my journey here on earth is that some of the simplest things from my past are things that are of great value and memories I deeply cherish.

The last thought here is this. We know not the future. At this moment on the 26^th of December, I actually do not know if I will make it to NYEs even as I have dinner plans for that evening. The evidence suggests I will wake up in 2026, but I don’t actually know. I do not mean this thought in a negative way. It is also not an original thought to assert that we should live each moment as it could be our last because we just do not know other than in one way. One day it will be true for each of us. That knowledge, if we keep it present in our lives, can lead us to more fulfilling moments. I am grateful for today. If you have ever read one of my posts, thank you!

What are you grateful for today?