The Gratitude Jar has become an increasingly popular method for recording positive moments in one’s life and reinforcing a mindset of—you guessed it!—gratitude. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s simple. There are several variations, but the basic steps are:
- Find a jar.
- Whenever something good happens in your life, write a short note about it, fold it up, and drop it into the jar.
- At the end of the year, open the jar and review all of these wonderful moments in your life for which you’re grateful.
- The following year, repeat steps one through three.
Mine is a clear acrylic box, the kind used to store trading cards. I have plenty of empty jars at home, but I chose a small container when I started it because at the time, I was spiraling into yet another bout of depression and anxiety, two demons that have plagued me since childhood. Gratitude was the furthest thing from my mind.
The past ten months have been turbulent for me and I’ve been struggling to adjust to the changes. I won’t bore you with the details and I’m certainly not fishing for sympathy. Suffice it to say that it’s been an enervating experience which exacerbated my chronic depression and sent my writing productivity—not to mention my outlook on life—plummeting. As a result, I felt myself foundering, failing, and generally falling apart.
Given all of that, I couldn’t see too many positive moments in my future, so why bother with a jar?
As you can see from the above image, the box is nearly full and we’re only halfway through the year. I also tossed in some uplifting fortunes from the occasional cookie.
Thus, I stand corrected. Clearly, I have much to be grateful for and seeing it manifested in this collection of notes reminds of this even through the darkest times.
While I’m still working to find the right direction for myself and struggling to surface from what has become the longest bout of depression in my life, perhaps I need to upgrade to a jar after all.