Small Pleasures

More than a decade ago, I came across a blog called Three Beautiful Things by a woman called Clare Law. It has the tagline "Every day I want to record three things that have given me pleasure." I blogged about it here. I have been grateful to her ever since, for introducing me to the wonderfully nourishing spiritual practice of gratitude, which I have blogged about many times.

These days, I record what I call 'Small Pleasures' each evening before I go to bed. Sometimes, they are HUGE, such as the joy which flooded my heart when I saw my son cradling his newborn son in his arms last November, but generally they are less spectacular.

The photos above are from our holiday last week in mid-Wales with my dear husband, my son and his family, and my daughter and her fiancé. It was a week of love and relaxation and fun, with so many small (and HUGE) pleasures, such as:

• finding another pair of lovely earrings at the market stall in Barmouth.
• S paddling in the sea at Benar Beach.
• all of us visiting Dolgoch Falls (my spiritual home) together.
• finding S's lost tooth in a puddle, so that he could put it under his pillow for the Tooth Fairy.
• playing Articulate! with my daughter and her fiancé.
  
• eating all together.
• having a go on a swing and flying high!
• completing the Nana's Hug blanket for my daughter's unborn son.

The trick of gratitude, I have found, is sacred living - weaving moments of attention into our lives, so that we are aware of all the lovely things happening around us. As I have written before, "Through sacred living, we will come to realise that God's grace is everywhere. Sacred living is about living with a new level of awareness. It is about going through our days paying attention to what is happening at each passing moment. It is about noticing the presence of the divine, the numinous, everywhere: in the natural world, in other people, in ourselves, and in things that happen to us. Sacred living is about rediscovering our sense of wonder, and living our lives in response to that. Sacred living is about truly appreciating what we have."

I have found over time that actively keeping a record of the many small pleasures in my life has exponentially increased my general level of happiness. Even when I've had a fairly crappy day, I can still be grateful for having got through it.... And on less good days, I sometimes read back through old 'Small Pleasures' to remind myself how very lucky and blessed I am.

Why not give it a try?