For many years my life looked like this: Alarm rings. Set the snooze. Wake late. Rush around. Yell at the kids to hurry up. Run out the door. Arrive at work in the nick of time. Attend back-to-back meetings. Return phone calls on the walk between meetings. Get to email if I’m lucky. Work late. Throw together dinner. Attend kid’s events. Get kids to bed. Collapse into my bed. Start over again the next day. Repeat Monday through Friday – then drop exhausted on Friday night into a fetal position on the couch.
Then I discovered Sarah Ban Breathnach’s book Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy. Each night I would go to bed a few minutes early – and read a daily passage. I would pause, reflect on the thoughts she presented about taking care of yourself and bringing more joy in your life. I adopted many of her suggestions, one of the most impactful being the practice of a Gratitude Journal, where daily I think back over the day and list the things I was grateful for. Some days there was much to be grateful for, other days I was grateful for just getting through the day. The combination of daily reflection and cultivating gratitude changed my life – for the better.
Taking time to pause, to reflect (even if only for 10 or 15 minutes) allowed me to breathe, to examine what I had experienced that day, to put it into perspective and to extract richness from the day. Focusing on what I was grateful for forced me to develop a keener eye for all the good things in my life – and once I noticed, I found ways to add more of those things into my daily routine. Today, daily reflection has become a treasured part of my day, enabling me to decompress, process, center, learn, and grow.
“Planning and reflection are the bookends of accomplishment.”
