The festive season and holidays present an excellent time to reflect on the year that has passed and consider the good and the bad things that have occured as well as the good and bad personal conduct in the way one has acted.
My reflections on 2014 whilst on holiday have had a common thread through them: I have not been thankful enough this year nor have I said thank you enough. That realization has left me pondering why and the answer has been fairly easy to see: at times in 2014 I have become so mired in negativity born both of myself and the conduct of others that I have been unable to recognize times when I should have been more thankful.
An easy example of this revolves around my change in roll during the year. I will no go into the details but it would be fair to say that I have been hung up on the circumstances of the move too much at stages this year to be thankful for:
- having a job when thousands in the community do not;
- having a job, now, that I really enjoy and that mentally stretches me; and
- having a job where the people I work for are: at the top of their fields and are wonderful people to work for.
Negativity and, by extension, depression has lead me to this lack of thankfulness. I am not going to apologize for that. Rather I am going to commit to 2015 being the year of the “Thankful Shumpty”. I will be negative and my depression will, at times, effect me at stages during the year but when I am going through those periods I am going to work hard on finding things in my life to, at the same time, be thankful for.
I will start now by saying again: thank you reading my writing. I have said before and I will say again that writing on this blog is a very large part of my strategy for working on my mental health. At times I have not been thankful enough for that.