For the month of November I’m participating in a daily gratitude challenge posted by the journaling app that I use, Day One, and here’s today’s prompt:
What have I learned from gratitude journaling?
This is my third year participating in a November Gratitude Journal. Last year’s experience led me to continue a reflection journal that I kept up, weekdays only, until the beginning of the following June, resulting in 153 posts/reflections. Last year, the school where I taught gave me the prompts to work with during November, but then I needed to come up with themes and areas of interest to keep the process going. The writer in me was excited at the possibility of writing every day about faith, journalism, education, technology and the media. While I began the process just responding with off the cuff comments, the journalist in me required that I do some actual thinking and research if I was going to share my work. Most days the actual writing took twenty to thirty minutes, but the research and rabbit holes I fell in often lasted from three to eight hours. At first I was only sharing the writing prompts with my students, but this was becoming way too much work for such a small, mostly disinterested audience (you know middle schoolers…)… so I started posting everything on my website and linked to all of my social media.
Last year’s experience had a real influence on my desire to do more actual journalism, but I was finding it hard to get it all done in a single day, which resulted in me stopping the daily reflection posts in early June and try to concentrate on longer articles (while transitioning from the daily teacher grind to… still undetermined…). I tried to keep up the five subject matter rotation, but some stories were taking days to produce and I started to lose motivation. I began to question what I was really trying to accomplish. I also wasn’t getting any responses towards working as a journalist somewhere (preferably without having to relocate from Las Vegas). Then this 2023 Gratitude journal hit at the beginning of the month and I put my efforts into really thinking about the prompts and my own journey and where I wanted to go with my writing.
It was a great challenge to have the daily prompts to respond to (even on weekends!) , though some prompts started to feel really close to navel gazing. Over the course of the last six months I’ve begun attending writers’ groups meetings and this is pushing me to consider longer form writing projects, but built on the daily writing process. Day One has a great daily writing prompt generator, so if something doesn’t pop up in my feeds, I might resort to the built-in prompt generator for the daily posts. But, writing-wise, my main focus will be on longer form writing projects with some form of weekly posting/sharing. Thanks 2023 Gratitude Journal for a great kick-start to my current writing journey. Enjoy the journey, y’all.
