Challenge #25: Count Your Blessings

I almost hate to title this challenge as such, because counting your blessings seems to be rather a trite phrase and practice touted by those self-helpers (and zealous religious persons) when a person is feeling overwhelmed by the events in their life.

Trite or not, it is an exercise I do when I feel myself focusing more on the negatives and 'have-tos' than the positives and 'want-tos'.  So, today, I find myself mentally counting my blessings.  Maybe you want to write yours down as you count them, I sometimes utilise pen and paper in my blessing counting.  But this morning, I am mostly busy doing other things with my hands, so it is a list in my head that I am creating.

Such as:

1. I am blessed with wholesome, homemade bread.  (We are down to our last 1/4 loaf, so making bread is high on today's to-do list for me. And since I don't want to buy that chemical-laden stuff called bread from the store, I must make my own.)
2. We have been blessed with abundant rain this season.  (So much so that the lawn needs to be mowed and the weeds in the garden seem to grow knee-high in just a day or two. And the hay still stands, a month late in cutting.)
3. I was blessed with a week and a half of having K3 at my house.  (I am cleaning up and stowing away the books and toys she played with while here.  Missing her too, but oh so glad for that tiring time I got to have her with me. Long distance grand-parenting is hard on the heart.)
4. I am glad to have a garden to weed.  (Really.  Even though my back, legs and one elbow are stiff and sore from all the weeding I've done in the last two days and there is still so much more to do before I'm caught up, I realize that many people are not able to have a garden at all, and here I am with nearly a quarter acre!)

See what I am doing?  Instead of overwhelming myself:  "oh woe, I have to make bread", "oh woe, the lawn needs to be mowed again--and the hay is still not cut--because it keeps raining about every second or third day", "oh woe, I miss K3 and look at all this stuff I have to put away", "oh woe, the horrible weeds in my garden, I'm never going to get them all", I am focusing on how blessed it is to be given these tasks and situations.

If you are feeling overwhelmed at all today, count your blessings. It's hard to count them and not feel some glimmer of joy. 

Even if you are content right now, count your blessings.  It will make you feel even better. 

As so many things in life are, it's all a matter of attitude.  (How's that for some more trite rhetoric?)