three good things

i am a sucker for book stores. i can browse for hours, looking at spines, flipping through pages, a flood of "must read" lists all coming back to me. and yet i know that my pile of to-read at home is big enough that i don't buy anything new. usually don't. unless it's a really good sale, because then it would be almost a crime not to.

one thing i do end up with more often then not, though, is a new journal. for a long while i was writing in them in my scribbly cursive, jotting down fragments of sentences and thoughts and half formed ideas, almost a scratch pad for this mass of words that is my blog. i know i could do that all digitally, but like i prefer holding physical pages to holding an e-reader, i prefer writing with a pen to typing things like this. the only reason i have an online presence is because it's really hard to share words on paper across the miles, unless you're willing to pay for postage.

so over the years i've grown a lovely collection of blank journals. but i stopped writing for a long time, and even those empty pages started stacking up. i felt like i needed to do something with all of them, lest i waste their endless possibilities. and so i started a daily journal of sorts.

somewhere along the line, someone told me (or i read it or just made it up, even though it sounds like it might be true) that to change your outlook on things, you need to focus on the positives in life and not the negatives. the negatives in my life have built up over the years, drowning out the positives. and being who i am and what i am, i would focus on them. obsessively. i would ponder on past mistakes, years old, wondering if any still thought i was a terrible person for all the things i did half a life ago. or i thought about all the things that i would have done differently, all the things that i did wrong, all the things i didn't do and then inaction turned out to be the wrong course. the random thoughts that would keep me up at night for hours, that i couldn't shut out of my brain.

so i've decided to focus on the positives. again, not sure where i came up with the idea exactly, i decided that no matter how crappy the day there were at least three good things that happened. then i would write those three good things down. so instead of my journals chronicling my angst and worry and fears, i would write down the good that happened in hopes that those things would be all i would remember.

i started on new years day, and am now more than halfway through the year. being me, i didn't keep it up everyday. there have been many times where i would sit down and try to remember my past week, thinking on all i did on those days, trying to come up with the good things to write and remember. and there have been a few occasions where i couldn't come up with three things, a few days only have two. i'm really not sure this little project has helped me much, but i do know that down the line, when the years wash some memories away, i will be able to pick up this particular journal and have good memories come back. so it's hard to remember, and some days are a struggle to come up with items to write, but i know my future self will thank me, somewhere down the line.