Sometimes you need a little perspective...

I admit it, I'm a moaner.  A complainer, a whiner, a negative nellie.  It's easier for me to see the bad than look for the good.  Not an attractive quality, I know, but I feel like I can be honest with all of you out in Blogland.  That's not to say I don't try to be better.  As I've got older, I've become mindful of the time wasted bothering myself about what other people are up to,  especially as I never feel like I quite have enough time in the day.   And Coop is a good, calming influence on me in this regard.  Eternally optimistic, almost always positive we balance each other out perfectly.  Still, life at times catches up with you and it's easy to get ground down by mundanity until a bit of perspective is thrown your way.

This week, we had a family bereavement of someone not much older than me.  It's not often that I think anyone is all-round good; (there I go again) in my opinion everyone has a little quirk in their personality that you see every now and then which is not quite so shiny and nice.  But not in this case.  She was one of the truly good people, ever positive despite a life of real hardship at times.  Although we were much closer when we were little and time and life had come between us, I was more upset than I expected to be when I heard the news.  Upset for her, for her family, for the years that will never come to be.  And it gave me that little shake needed every so often to make you step back and gain a little perspective on how lucky you really are.   

I started to think about documenting the small but important things that happen every day in my life that make me feel happy and loved so that I don't wait for something so dramatic to happen before I appreciate them in the future.  And I thought that maybe you would like to see some of the things that have inspired me so far.

1) Jenerally Speaking

Jen is a fellow East-Anglian crafter who was inspired by this Pinterest post to keep a record of life each day on an index card in just a sentence or two.  Each year, you reuse the same card for that date so you can track your life from one year to the next.  I think this is such an excellent idea; it's so easy to be swept from one week to the next without realising that it's even passing you by let alone year to year.  It would be nice to be able to look back through the years and trace your life back every now and then.  

2) Mollie Makes Inspiration

I stumbled across this video from Hailey Bartholomew on the Mollie Makes Inspiration blog page and found myself blubbing for ages afterwards.  Hailey embarked upon the task of photographing each day something that made her feel grateful so that she learnt to recognise the good things she has in her life.  She's collated these now into a video, narrating what she learnt along the way.  N.B.  Don't watch this if you're feeling emotional, it's a tear-fest!

3) One Sheepish Girl 52 Weeks of Instax
I know you know how much I love Meredith's One Sheepish Girl blog.  And this is one of the things I have found particularly inspiring.  Using an instant camera, (you know, the kind that prints out the photo straight from the camera, not high quality but quite fun) Meredith photographed something that happened each week of the year and displayed it in a picture frame.  

I tried to do this earlier this year after crazing Coop to buy me a Polaroid camera for my birthday.  Although I kept it up initially, I soon forgot to take my camera out and about with me (it's a bit of a chunky monkey) and the weeks soon whittled away.  

So what's my plan?   Well, I'm not quite sure yet.  I think whatever project I decide upon, I won't start until the new year, as I want to make sure I set aside the time to make a proper job of it.  I'm thinking of perhaps using my Polaroid camera to try a month of gratitude, finding a small thing each day that makes me happy and capturing it in a photo to display in my frame to remind me.  And if I can keep it up for a month, who knows?  Perhaps I can keep it going for 2014...