Grateful human

Every morning, I journal about stuff I’m grateful for. I plop it all down on the cream-colored page: Water, air, having loved ones, and more. I focus on stuff that’s more relevant, typically, but I don’t shy away from the everyday. Sometimes I even document my gratitude for the pen and paper I’m using. It’s all good…and it’s all a gift. It’s a habit that started during a rough patch.

In 2017, I began navigating divorce. My ex-wife and I had four younger kids at the time, so it was tough! For me, that journey generated lots of anger, regret, hopelessness, and fear. I was at my wits’ end one summer morning around 3 AM, so I went for a run, which I never did at the time, and that’s when I came up with a crazy idea.

I laced up a pair of dirty tennis shoes, and took off. It was dark and quiet and I didn’t have my phone or any kind of music. It was just me, the darkness, and my thoughts.

On that run, I experienced clarity about the disfunction going on in my head and heart. “This NOT working.” I wasn’t sleeping well, and I know I wasn’t working well. So, for kicks, I wondered: What if I could convince myself it’s all good?

I started journaling, opening with the most abundant emotion, “Thank God for rage!” The gratitudes flowed—I had a lot of bad stuff to be grateful for—and I started feeling better somehow. The next day, I did it again. And again…and so on. Eventually, the bad stuff gave way to good stuff.

Today, every day, many years after that journal started, I’m still documenting things I’m grateful for. Some of it is “bad stuff,” but most of it is good. I have a lot to be grateful for, which is great, but also uniquely human.

Recently, to find out how human it was, I asked Claude about gratitude.

We humans…we’re worried about AI and the impact it is having on our lives. It’s appropriate, but one thing is clear to me based on my life experiences and the exercise of being grateful…our humanity is not in jeopardy.

It’s so great being human, and having “…experiences that accumulate.”

So, here, in this online journal, I plan to write about things that are super human…stuff that only we enjoy, struggle with, solve, and so on. I may use em dashes along the way—I used them long before ChatGPT—but it’ll be 100% human generated.

Enjoy. And feel free to comment…as long as you’re human.