Happy Thanksgiving and a call to action

Nov 24, 2011 · 2 minute read · Comments
Thanksgivinggratitude

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Please take time out to give thanks today, whether out loud or silently.

Yesterday I wrote about how every day is Thanksgiving. At the end of the post, I wondered about further improving my gratitude practice. I woke up today with a burning desire to take action. I’d like to know what you think of my specific ideas.

Gratitude letters

I first heard about gratitude letters from the fantastic book “The How of Happiness” by Sonja Lyubomirsky. The idea is to directly write a letter of gratitude to an individual.

I thought about this in the context of all the free and open source software I use regularly for work or for personal purposes. I was thinking that I should start taking the time to thank, one by one, each of the developers or teams of such software.

Also, I follow a lot of blogs. Many of them don’t have many followers, so commenting more and offering gratitude would probably be very welcome.

Gratitude-themed blog post

Perhaps I could reserve one day a week of my blog for the gratitude theme.

Gratitude in every blog post

Or I could find a way to express gratitude in every blog post I write.

Gratitude tweets

Maybe I could tweet gratitude more often. I don’t want to annoy my Twitter followers with too much though. And I admit I don’t like the length restriction. I guess I don’t see as much value in tweeting gratitude as in writing even a decent one-paragraph email to someone.

Integrate into Digital Sabbath

Recently I began to observe a little bit of a Digital Sabbath on which I do not write a blog post. Maybe I could reserve the day after the Digital Sabbath for a gratitude-oriented post?

Other ideas

Lyubomirsky has other ideas, some of which are in this interview.

Your ideas

What ideas do you have about how to integrate more gratitude into your life, starting this Thanksgiving? Or ideas you have about how I should integrate more gratitude into my life, into my blog?

Postscript

I will be observing an extended Digital Sabbath till the end of the weekend. There will be a lot of turkey, and a lot of friends and family to see again.