Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, was president of the American Psychological Society when he called for more research and thought on positive psychology. He and others saw a need for a branch of work that paid attention to how to be happy, how to find and experience joy and related positive experiences and feelings. He reports in his book, "Flourish", that his students rated his assignment of listing three positive things that happened each day a very helpful exercise and many continued it after finishing his course.
Both Lynn and I have found regular listing easy and valuable. I was surprised at how many candidates there were for the three items. As I became more aware of very good events in my day, I began to be able to recall 6 or ten easily.
The practice of writing a blog about what has been happening, what I have been thinking and reading and feeling, has made me aware of incidents or insights that seem surprising or lovely or sweet. I am confident that we humans are quite flexible and we learn. If I regularly collected insults, fears and damages, I would become more aware of them, be able to recall them and extrapolate from them, as well.
Just as happened with listing things to be grateful for, staying alert to daily issues, questions, gifts and difficulties, staying alert to what comes up, what goes down, creates a sharpened awareness of events. I don't want to be too sugary nor too sour so I try to use salience, what sticks out, what comes to mind later. I often compose a blog post quickly and fully in my head, only to completely forget the whole thing, five minutes later. Part of me gets confident that the forgotten item, dissolved beyond recall and now totally lost, was the best thing, the most valuable post, ever composed by anyone ever. So, I am now in the habit of jotting down a few words to assist in recall, IF I can decipher the scrawl I made at the time. It is the many occasions when I do decipher what I wrote and find the idea trivial, repetitious, too private, too boring or such that gives me the notion that the forgotten prompt was over-rated in absentia.
