World Gratitude Day is September 21st, and so instead of a month in review, here’s a different kind of round-up: a look back at what this blog has had to say about gratitude and #threegoodthings.
Where the #ThreeGoodThings habit started. Sam’s version of the daily practice goes back to a rough November, when she wrote about making a conscious effort to acknowledge gratitude, sharing personal examples alongside research on what noticing good things actually does for mental and physical health. A few weeks later, Catherine turned the same impulse into a group project, inviting the blog’s contributors to rewrite a Julie Andrews classic verse by verse in these are a few of our favorite things — proof that gratitude doesn’t have to be solemn or serious.
Why bother, and does it work? Cate took the research question seriously in her post is there a relationship between gratitude and health?, digging into the evidence that a regular practice does something measurable, partly through motivation and partly through the social connection it builds. Elan comes at gratitude sideways, through appreciation for other people and other things: Elan’s in praise of rec sports volunteers is a thank-you to the unpaid labour that makes community sport possible, and her later post on grace and gratitude in mindful eating reworks the old habit of saying grace before a meal into something more reflective and less doctrinal.
#ThreeGoodThings, the practice itself. By 2022, Sam had folded the daily habit into her recovery from knee replacement surgery in three good things: the fit feminist edition, using it to notice weekly milestones instead of daily ones and to push back against the seasonal slump. The following November brought happy Planksgiving, which links gratitude season to the blog’s long-running plank challenge and confirms the #ThreeGoodThings habit was, by then, just part of how Sam moves through the fall. A year after that, she made the case for spreading it further in share your #3GoodThings: join the movement, noting that the habit had stuck for years and had already caught on with friends and fellow bloggers.
Bringing it up to now. Last summer, gratitude got tested rather than celebrated: gremlins? Sam’s weekend with six weirdly small, bad things catalogues a run of minor technical disasters and still lands on “there were also lots of good things too” — a good demonstration that the practice can hold both at once. Then, on the day itself last year, Sam marked Happy World Gratitude Day with a version of the daily list — a song that gets stuck in her head every September 21st, a bike ride with friends, a walk through Rockwood Conservation with her daughter and the dog. And Sam’s three good things, the coccoon edition finds three good things in a restorative yoga pose, a hard trip to Montreal, and a Duolingo streak — which is to say, in the small stuff, same as always.
The practice, explained. Most recently, Elan turned interviewer for positive is practice: Sam’s 3 good things, asking Sam directly why she’s kept posting daily good things for six years running. Sam traces it back to that same 2020 November post, describes how it went from a seasonal habit to a year-round one, and Elan connects it to a Hidden Brain episode on negativity bias and “gain-framing” — the idea that we’re wired to dwell on what went wrong and have to work at noticing what went right. Sam is candid about the limits of the practice, too: she also posts bad news and rejections, worries about seeming like it’s “all good things all the time,” and admits she’s skipped days when things were too bleak. But mostly, the good things are just simple and still real: light on the water on a canoe trip, a hummingbird, loons, hot tea and cookies. As she puts it, “the world is a beautiful place.”
So: Happy World Gratitude Day. What are your three good things today?
This round-up was assembled by Claude with prompts from Sam and edited by Sam. If you spot any errors, let us know.
Related
Discover more from FIT IS A FEMINIST ISSUE
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Published by
By
