If you missed anything the first time around, now’s your chance to check it out!
San Francisco: Happy Life (Infographic)
San Francisco Travel Tips (Infographic)
Our Categories Aren’t Our Reality
Approaches to Self-Understanding
Books I Loved as a Child and Beyond
No, really, still your life for a moment. On this crazy day when people are running around trying to get Black Friday deals or whatever else … just pause for a moment, remember the gratitude of Thanksgiving and celebrate the beauty of stillness.
A shout out to my kid brother who is celebrating his 29th birthday today. I wish I could be there!
Since it’s the week of Thanksgiving I thought that I’d share some of the things that I do to practice, remember and celebrate thankfulness in my life.
At the end of each day I try to take a moment to sit down and send a Tweet/ Facebook post listing everything about my day. I usually focus on the things that gave me joy, made me feel creativity or productive or were just positive in some way. This is a small thing that I do to help remind myself to recognize what I’m grateful for each day. It’s also nice because a lot of times people reply back about their days and I get to celebrate the little things with those I care about.
Just in the last month or two I’ve started doing this with a group of three of my friends from school. Basically we each text something that happened during the day that was happy and also something that was crappy. I like this because it allows me to pause and think about what has made me happy. It also reminds me that it’s okay to not just be happy all the time and there’s some relief in regularly sharing the little and big things that are hard during the day. Each time I do this, I’m grateful for the support of the people doing it with me and the support of the wider school program that I’m a part of. And sometimes when I can’t think of a really bad crappy and it’s just a small one it makes me feel grateful for that fact alone!
I got this idea from one of Julia Cameron’s creativity books. I think it was from Walking in the World but it may have been Vein of Gold. Anyway, she suggests daily walks and I can’t remember her specific suggestion but at some point she suggests focusing on gratitude during the walk. I think maybe she suggests once a week. Anyway, I don’t do this every day but I do try to remember to do it when I’m walking a puppy or just walking somewhere. I try to spend at least ten minutes of the walk just mindfully focusing on the things that I’m grateful for.
I don’t keep a gratitude journal. I used to but I didn’t really keep it up and actually I started the aforementioned daily tweets as a way to be more accountable to daily gratitude. But I do keep a regular journal and periodically try to use it to focus on the things that I’m grateful for in my life. Usually of course these relate to the same broad topics – friends, family, health, opportunities, etc. but each time that I focus on the details within those things I’m reminded what a charmed life I really do have in this wonderful city with fascinating and loving people.
Yesterday I mentioned that I’d been in Novato and gone to an aviation history museum. While there I also went to an art gallery/ museum.
A little while back I was on a day trip north of San Francisco and ended up in Novato, a town I really didn’t know anything about. We decided to take a random turn and ended up checking out an art gallery and then the Hamilton Field History Museum.
Sometimes it’s fun to pick up little crafts and toys and play with them.
I’m not honestly very good (or patient) at putting models together but this was a small project and fun.
Plus it came in a cute box that I’ll keep to store other craft supplies.
The finished boat is now on my fireplace mantle.
I love this optical illusion that I saw hanging in one of the homes where I was petsitting. What do you see?
Like optical illusions? Here are ten more.
Well, she tried to eat a school handout I really wanted anyway.
It’s a list that we got of different therapy tools that we can use. In my Therapeutic Communication class we role play therapists and clients throughout the semester and we have to write up case notes. The handout is helpful for identifying the right techniques to use and writing up those papers. I have all of the information in my own notes from our book sbut this was a nice handout that had it in one concise place for me. Guess puppy didn’t agree. 
