I have decided it’s time I took my own advice.

I am a therapist and I regularly recommend to my clients that they capture the best thing that has happened to them in any particular day. I ask them to float back through their experience of the day just ended and settle on what has brought them the most happiness in the day. It need not be anything huge, in fact it is most often something very small – a shop assistant smiles and is pleasant, a snatch of bird song, something works well when we had feared the worst.

Once, they have identified the incident, I ask them to dwell on it in their thoughts, not rushing it but mentally sucking on it like you would suck on a toffee. And to stay with their thoughts about it until it loses any savour. It’s often a surprise how long they stay with the memory . The incident is something they would have hardly noticed or remembered without doing the exercise. And the intensity of the pleasure in recalling it is often a surprise. There is a lot of hidden joy locked up in that small event.

In therapy this exercise is to counterbalance the bad experiences of life that my clients are having. No one comes to a therapist because they are too happy. And in suffering we can become inured to feeling low all the time. It becomes a sort f default mood setting. We allow our mental screen saver to be of the bad things and we automatically minimize the good to a little dot on the toolbar. This exercise is to help us capture all the good that there is in any day.

I also recommend that they keep a diary of these good things and try to write up a paragraph about them as well as just think about them. This then creates a written record of the good things to which we can return later. It stands as a reminder that life is far from all bad even when we are suffering difficult circumstances. Quite often my clients report that the exercise has been of benefit to them. Sometimes, it helps them get off to sleep when they had found that difficult.

The trouble is I very rarely do it for myself. So – the idea of this blog if for me to keep a record of some of these good things in my days, write them down and benefit from them myself. I figure that starting a blog will keep me to doing this exercise because I will have to post regularly if the blog is to be any use. If you end up reading this blog, then I hope you too might get some vicarious benefit and maybe start using the exercise yourself for your benefit.

I am going to try and post something about three times a week.