My heart feels tender: I am leaving France. 

At the same time, I am excited to be coming home. 

I am grateful for the nostalgia in my heart because it means my heart is open. I am willing to experience this as it is from all the wonderful moments I have spent in the last 10 days connecting with family and friends. 

Yesterday, I was noticing how privileged I am. That led me to research the guilt of being privileged. 

I get stuck in trying to justify being privileged while others are not. I realized that no matter what I come up with as an explanation to privilege, it doesn’t matter. What matters is “acknowledge it, appreciate it, don’t judge others, and do the best you can with what you’ve got.” (Pete Michaud)

I am privileged. I can choose between feeling guilty about this or just accepting and appreciating so that I can have a positive ripple effect around me.

I am still feeling guilty for being privileged sometimes but I am working on it. 

I am grateful I am privileged. 

One of the reason behind my gratitude posts is that I want to enjoy my life more. In the last few days, I have been around a lot of kids and I have watched them play. And similar to the pedal boat adventure, I have noticed all the excuses I use to stop myself from playing. At the same time, I made a point to do what the kids around me do to test it and see if I like it. 

So I got to jump in the swimming pool and get out over and over and over and over again. And I had forgotten, but there are many different kind of ways to jump in a pool! How does it get any better than that?

I was talking about gratitude with a friend of mine and she mentioned the Coué method. It is a method of conscious autosuggestion, famous in France. I wondered: how is gratitude journaling different from auto-suggestion?

Maybe for some people it is the same and for others it isn’t. 

The way I see it, gratitude is just one tool to increase my well being and it is not the only one. It is important to me to use as many tools as I can and to keep looking for different tools that work for me. In the end, gratitude may work better when used together with other well being tools. 

And gratitude journaling may work some days and not work others. But when we stop on the days when it seems like it is not working, it makes it harder to use on the days when it would work.

What other tools could you discover to bring more magic into your life?

I am preparing this post lying on the ground, under a starry sky. A few nights ago, a few of us decided to sleep outside under the stars. It was so beautiful that I could not close my eyes. After a couple of hours I chose to go sleep inside to catch some sleep before dawn. But before that, I got to see a few shooting stars!

How did I get so lucky?

I am grateful for laughing so much that I had tears rolling down my eyes. What would it take for more of that?

I have the ability to move people: it is easy for me to organize a trip for a group and to plan the details involved in getting a group of people from point A to B.

I call it a gift because it is easy and fun for me to do, I am good at it, and when acknowledge this as a gift it contributes more to my life than if I take it for granted. 

I was talking to my cousin about this and she said that she has the ability to think outside the box but had never thought of calling it a gift. 

What do you do that you can you do easily, that is fun for you to do that you could call a gift?

I am grateful for trying something new. 

At the lake, there was a couple of young men playing with a slack line. I had seen people playing with that in Whistler and kind of wondered. Based on the previous pedal boat and swimming adventure, I thought to myself “if I do it, I’ll be happy I’ve done it” so I asked the guys if I could try. It was awesome! I did not manage to do much, just stand on the line long enough for a picture but it was a great feeling! I am glad I did it. 

I am grateful for my dad’s contribution to my gratitude posts.

In the last few days, he has discussed and expressed that one might be against the idea of gratitude in the sense of giving thanks to someone. So another question we can ask ourselves at the end of the day is “what made me smile today?” 

I like this question but maybe there are days when we did not smile. So I came up with a other one:

In case you’re having an especially bad day, you can ask “what was the least unpleasant about my day?” and my all time favorite: “what else is possible?”

I am grateful for meeting new people. Meeting new people is like an adventure. 
And for me every little adventure makes my life more interesting. 

What little adventure are you having today?