I realize that I’ve harped on this before (moi? harp?) but I believe in blessing counting. Do I always do it? Nope. it’s easy to slide out of the habit, just as it’s easy to pop outta bed without taking time to say “Today is a good day to live.” I’ve thought about that Buddhist saying that it’s a good day to die, and that should infer that you live consciously until you die, but you know life ends in death, so let’s, as the saying goes, make hay while the sun shines.

The careful totting up of life’s blessings, large and small, helps us to remain thankful. Being thankful puts us in a much better frame of mind. If we go to bed aware of the abundance, we wake up filled with it. How can that do anything but make our lives better?

But as started to write this, I realized, well, what if I started counting the progress I’d made toward Peace every night. Would that encourage me to lengthen the list? I once wrote a poem in which I suggested counting your blessings with bites of ice cream. there was no more ice cream than there were blessings. So how much ice cream would I get if I could only eat when I enumerated a Peace-ibility! I’m thinking I’d get better at it! (sorta like clicker training for Peaceful humans!)

I always worry when I talk about this, that we will get fatuous. We begin to talk blithely about the “wonderful” challenges put in front of us… there may be blessings we can wring out of challenges, but they’re in our lives because they are, not because they were meant to teach us blessings!

But still —to be able to say at the end of the day, that I took these steps toward Peace. To begin to raise my expectations of myself that I might become a better Peacemaker. There’s an interesting challenge… and the topic of tomorrow’s poem? who knows?