Category Archives: books

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Advent week 1: a Christmas post roundup

Considering my interest this year in finding practical ways to observe the rhythms of a healthy Christian life (e.g., giving up checking email on Sundays, taking a quarterly three-hour meditation “retreat”), you might think that I have a great plan to celebrate Advent.  I don’t.  I’m just going to do what I always do, which is to break out my Christmas decorations and music on December 1.  (I actually jumped the gun a little this year–I got my Christmas tea towels out yesterday.  And now for the big confession: I’ve been listening to the Celtic Holidays station on Pandora for weeks.)  But I have decided to write a Christmas post every Monday of the four weeks of Advent.  I have no idea what I’m going to write in most of these posts, but I’ll figure it out as I go.  Some of the posts may be better than others, but won’t that be more exciting than those chocolate Advent calendars that reveal the exact same square of bland chocolate every day?  I think so.

I feel a heavy, but probably totally imaginary, weight of expectation on my proverbial shoulders as I prepare to write these posts because I’ve always made a point of writing excellent Christmas posts ever since I began my blog in 2011, a tradition I’ve kept up even during periods when I’ve largely neglected to post  My first Christmas post , written just days after I started the blog, was short but profound.  Since then, I’ve written about topics as widely varying as A Christmas Carol adaptations, the school shooting that occurred in Newtown, CT, near Christmas in 2012 (a post I didn’t want to write but felt compelled to), Danny Kaye’s socks, a Charles Dickens Christmas story that’s NOT A Christmas Carol, and my bird ornaments.

In college, when I couldn’t figure out how to start a paper, I used to take up a page or more on introducing the topic, telling tangentially related anecdotes, and apologizing for what was to come.  By then, I was already well into my required page count!  I guess I haven’t changed much since then; I basically just did the blog version of that exact thing.  This post won’t be an entire waste of your time, however, if you click on the links in the preceding paragraph.  And I promise not to waste your time in my remaining three Advent posts (and my Boxing Day post!  It’s on a Monday this year).  When I next write to you, I’ll have all my bird ornaments up and will have listened to Harry Connick, Jr.’s When My Heart Finds Christmas (another vintage Penelope post topic) at least once.  See you then.

 

 

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Is grit good?

This post is going to be fairly similar to one that I wrote a few weeks ago entitled “Satisfaction is not in my nature.”  Today I’m taking a slightly different approach to an issue, or constellation of issues, that I wrestle with a lot.

If you read a post I wrote about a year ago, “I am not fast,” you know that I’m a little cocky about having a high degree of what is, admittedly, an unglamorous character quality: endurance, persistence, tenacity, grit…whatever you want to call it.  Basically, it takes a lot to make me quit.  That last term, grit, has become a buzzword in psychology and education over the past few years.  Studies are now showing, or at least we’re being told that they are, that grit is a better indicator of success in college than IQ or even high school GPA.  And other studies are corroborating the common-sense conclusion that grit remains a useful characteristic in various areas of one’s life, including career and relationships.

So even though it’s not as exciting as being fast or amazingly creative or highly articulate, having grit has become a bit of a source of pride for me.  It’s closely related to a quality that I’ve often been complimented on since childhood: being disciplined.  With that one, it’s a little easier to see how I could start to become smug and feel morally superior to people who do hit the snooze button at least once before they wake up.

In several of my recent posts, I referred to a book I read recently, The Gift of Being Yourself by David G. Benner.  It’s actually the second book in Benner’s Spiritual Journey trilogy, of which I’m now reading the last book, Desiring God’s Will.  (For no strategic reason, I will be reading the first book, Surrender to Love, last–that’s just the order in which I acquired them.)  Benner has spent the first couple of chapters of Desiring God’s Will shattering my pride in being disciplined.  While he doesn’t completely discount the value of self-control (after all, it’s one of the fruits of the Spirit) he shows, from Scripture and common-sense observation, that discipline can lead to pride and rigidity and–most disturbingly–lead us to believe we don’t need God, and therefore cause us to pass ignorantly by the surprising blessings that God reserves for those who gladly participate in the fulfillment of his kingdom.

Having demolished my pride in being disciplined, Benner goes a step further in the section I read this morning and casts doubt on the unqualified value of grit (though he doesn’t use that word or refer to any of the recent scholarship on the topic).  Heretically (especially to American readers), Benner posits that there are times when it may be not only okay to quit, but even sinfully stubborn not to quit.  I need to go back and read the section again to make sure I really understand, but I think he’s right.  I can think of one situation in my recent life in which I probably should have given up on something a lot sooner than I did.  It makes me cringe to write that, but there it is.

As I’m reading this book, I keep thinking about Perelandra, the second novel in C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, and the Adam and Eve-like characters who lived on a floating island and had absolutely no control over where they went.  They just had to trust their creator.  Could I live like that?

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the Harry Potter list

Sometimes there’s so much Harry Potter stuff going on, I have to make a list to keep it all straight.

  1. The illustrated edition of Chamber of Secrets was released very recently, but I just finally got around to reading the illustrated Sorcerer’s Stone.  Jim Kay’s illustrations are gorgeous, highly detailed (you can stare at the Hogwarts interiors for hours), sometimes surprising (Hagrid dresses like a biker–which makes sense since we first see him on a motorcycle, but I never thought of it!), and occasionally even startling (Snape’s creepy eyes!).  I’m looking forward to seeing how he approaches memorable book 2 characters like Gilderoy Lockhart and the basilisk, and I’m really curious as to whether the ratio of pictures to text will continue to be similar as the books get massive.
  2. Tomorrow is the first day of November, which is release month for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them!  I realize that Harry Potter is not going to be in this movie, nor any of our beloved characters (I hear Dumbledore is namedropped, but I think that’s about the extent of it), but I’m really excited about getting back into the Wizarding world.  This is the first movie for which J. K. Rowling has actually written the screenplay, which means, if nothing else, that it’s going to be lush with detail.  It also helps that Eddie Redmayne is beautiful.  But the element of this film I may be looking forward to the most is the fact that there’s a major character who’s non-magical.  What will it mean for HP fandom that people like us are now part of the story?  I will be blogging about this, no doubt.
  3. With all the publishing action happening this year, Harry Potter festivals seem to be back on the rise.  I attended one this past Saturday in Scottsville, a very small town in central Virginia that for three years running has transformed its (also very small) downtown business district into Hogsmeade.  Lines were long at places like Honeydukes (normally a bookstore and coffee shop) and Ollivander’s (normally a tattoo and massage parlor), but in other establishments, it was easy to duck inside, take in the fabulously creative displays (I loved the hand-lettered envelopes at the owl post location) and perhaps contribute to the local economy by making a purchase (I bought two beeswax taper candles at the owl post place, which in its Muggle life is a beekeeping supply shop).  Perhaps the most fun part of the festival (other than getting a signed photo of Gilderoy Lockhart at Flourish and Blotts–that guy was fabulous) was the people-watching.  I saw some fantastic costumes (Moaning Myrtle, the painting of Sirius Black’s mother, a trio of house-elves) and a lot of fairly obscure fan t-shirts–the kind you can’t just impulsively buy at Target.  I hope to return to this festival next year, and I also hope the weather will be more seasonally appropriate.  It was about 80 degrees on Saturday, and I was dressed as Professor Trelawney.  There was a lot of fabric draped over and around me.
  4. Today is Halloween.  That means that it’s the anniversary of Lily and James Potter’s tragic death (I saw their gravestone in Scottsville, too–there was a lovely old church with the Godric’s Hollow graveyard recreated outside), as well as of the baby Harry Potter’s amazing, unlikely defeat of Voldemort.  Halloween is also a good day to have a huge feast with live bats swooping overhead (that always seems unsanitary to me)…and a good day for…wait for it…a TROLL IN THE DUNGEON!  Thought you ought to know.
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a gallery of picture books

I am teaching a college class about children’s literature, and today our topic was picture books.  Truly, we could spend a whole semester on these beautiful works that are not merely cute stories (I challenged my students not to use the word “cute” in any of their papers for the rest of the semester) or fond memories from childhood.  Picture books represent an astonishing variety of artistic styles and mediums; they tell stories that may incorporate irony and sensitive characterization, and–yes–they sometimes teach lessons ranging from basic counting to eating in moderation (both of which are found in The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, a simple and delightful book that doesn’t feel like it’s teaching any lessons).

During the 75-minute class period, I had time to read seven entire picture books to the class, while pausing to point out important details in the text and illustrations.  Here are the books we read, along with a few observations about each.

  1. Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present, words by Charlotte Zolotow and pictures by Maurice Sendak.  This book draws from two very grown-up artistic traditions.  Magical realism, a literary tradition in which bizarre events happen to normal people and are treated as no big deal, is evident in the protagonist’s conversation with a rabbit who is taller than she is and from whom she has no problem taking advice.  Meanwhile, the pictures in the story, with their pastoral setting, pastel colors, and blurred brushstrokes, seem to fit into the school of impressionism.
  2. The Story of Ferdinand, words by Munro Leaf and pictures by Robert Lawson.  The text, about a bull who would rather smell flowers than fight, is laugh-out-loud funny (I say that because I actually laughed out loud while reading it), and the black-and-white line drawings are amazingly detailed and delightful.  We don’t expect to find irony in pictures books, but the whole impact of this story comes from an ironic reversal involving the key word “mad”: Everyone wants to make Ferdinand mad so he’ll fight, but he ends up making everyone else mad when he sits down to smell the flowers.
  3. Tuesday, words and pictures by David Wiesner.  This almost-wordless book, in which frogs launch off on lily pads and begin to fly through an average neighborhood, is illustrated in a style that our textbook calls surrealism, and I have to agree.  I bet Salvador Dali wishes he thought of painting a picture of a guy eating a sandwich in his kitchen while frogs are flying past the window.  Another wonderful thing about this book is that the ending isn’t really an ending–there’s an indication that more magic is going to happen next Tuesday.
  4. The Very Hungry Caterpillar–I’ve already mentioned this one, and it’s so well-known that there’s not much more that I can say about it.  For a very short book, there’s an awful lot going on, and it’s brilliant.
  5. Come Away from the Water, Shirley, words and pictures by John Burningham.  This is a very funny book about a little girl having an adventure with pirates while her clueless mother keeps admonishing her not to get tar on her shoes or to pick up any smelly seaweed.  There is huge irony in the layout of the book; the parents’ boring day at the beach is illustrated in washed-out colors on the left-hand side of each page spread, while Shirley’s simultaneous adventure is depicted in bold colors on the right.  The deliberately naive drawing style reminds me of Charles Schultz’s Peanuts.  (Shirley’s head is perfectly round, like Charlie Brown’s.)
  6. Make Way for Ducklings, words and pictures by Robert McCloskey.  This one might be my favorite of the ones we read today.  The sepia pencil drawings aren’t necessarily eye-catching at first, but they grow on you as the story continues, taking you flying above real locations in Boston (this book has a strong sense of place).  I love how the police officer, Michael, is so serious about helping these ducks get through the city safely that he gets practically the entire Boston PD involved.  This books has it all: onomatopoeia, repetition, and even a quest narrative.
  7. Where the Wild Things Are, words and pictures by Maurice Sendak.  Speaking of books that have it all: this one is also a quest narrative, with a chiastic structure, internal rhyme, and a plot that make psychoanalytical theorists go crazy.  But it’s also a story about a boy who feels wild and out of place, learning that he belongs right where he is, where his mother loves him and keeps his dinner waiting for him, still hot.  Now that’s a good story.

Picture books aren’t just for children or people with children.  Read some this week!

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Who am I?

I’m Jean Valjean.  Actually, this post is not about Les Miserables; I just thought I would create a fake segue from last week’s post to this one.  That line is one of the best moments in the musical, though.

This morning the topic of faculty convocation at my institution was “The Modern Identity Crisis.”  We do realize that this is now the postmodern era, but the title was a reference to a paradigm shift that occurred during the Enlightenment.  Broadly speaking, in ancient and medieval times, you were born into a certain family, class, and trade, and you didn’t worry about discovering who you were really meant to be.  (So that question in A Knight’s Tale, “Can a man change his stars?”–nobody was really asking it at that time period.  But they also weren’t listening to classic rock.  That movie is a fantasy, in case you weren’t sure.)  But in the modern period, the question of individual identity became paramount, and it’s only become more confusing as the world has become simultaneously more diverse and more homogenous.

In this post, I want to point out a few recent manifestations of the drive to self-define that may appear silly or harmless, but that are actually quite telling and potentially powerful.  One is the proliferation of assessment tools, ranging from research-based psychiatric tests to three-question quizzes on advertising webpages (“What’s your guest bathroom decorating style?”), designed to help us categorize ourselves and others.  Young adult literature fans very seriously discuss the implications of being in a particular Hogwarts (and now Ilvermorny) house or a certain faction in the dystopian world of Divergent, and each of these fandoms offers a variety of official and unofficial tests and quizzes for determining where one belongs.  Many people, including myself, never tire of talking about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicators and the rampant memes that lead us to identify ourselves with characters from various worlds (The Lord of the Rings, The Office, the Bible) based on MBTI. We give these assessment instruments so much power that they are almost like a postmodern version of divination.  Instead of looking to stars or tea leaves to tell us how are lives are going to turn out, or how to make decisions, we look at our personality types.

Our self-defining statements can also create limitations on who and what we are willing to be and do.  Some of these statements give us excuses for our perceived weaknesses (“English people don’t do math,” or vice versa); others allow us to feel superior to others (“Academics don’t watch football”).  And some of these statements, especially when made and believed by children and teenagers, can actually create deep-rooted habits that can shape the quality of a person’s life (“Nerds don’t do physical exercise”).

I’m not trying to be dire or dour.  I think it’s fun to discuss these things (as long-time readers of my blog know, I’m a Hufflepuff, and I’m also an ISFJ), but I’m afraid too many of us are limiting ourselves because we’re letting our categories determine our destinies.

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“Satisfaction is not in my nature.”

I’ve recently read several books and articles that argue that nearly everyone’s deepest motivations can be placed into one of just a few broad categories, such as power or belonging.  I also recently read The Gift of Being Yourself, in which the author, Christian psychologist David G. Benner explains the ugly side of that same concept: everyone’s besetting sins can be traced back to a deep need they feel is unfulfilled, and that these deep needs can be organized into one of nine categories.  Of course, there’s infinite variety in the manifestations of our motivations, needs, and sins, but at the root, we’re all more similar than we like to think.

The title of my post is something that Loki, in an unusually honest moment, said to Thor in Thor: The Dark World.  His point was that taking revenge on those who had killed the brothers’ mother, Frigga, wouldn’t bring him any closure or contentment.  In fact, as is abundantly clear in the series of films, nothing can really content Loki, because he wants EVERYTHING: a throne, Odin’s respect, the world, the universe…and even that wouldn’t be enough.

Satisfaction isn’t in my nature, either.  I’m realizing that a lot of my surface-level sins and struggles–anger, for instance–arise from a deep desire to have it all.  Here are some examples:

I envy other people their talents.  Because I don’t want to just be good at writing and teaching.  I want to be good at everything.

I sometimes eat more than I should.  Because I want to try one of everything!  And maybe more than one.

I crowd my schedule and wear myself out by saying “yes” not only to too many work obligations and volunteer commitments, but also to too many fun activities.  Because FOMO.

The tricky thing about this lack of satisfaction is that most Western societies today act like it’s a good thing.  Contentment gets associated with mediocrity, laziness, and an unnatural lack of desire.  Lack of contentment, on the other hand, is repackaged as ambition (which is supposed to be good unless you’re talking about Slytherin House or Macbeth), willingness to change and improve, and an insatiable thirst for learning, excellence, awesome experiences . . . you name it.

This is one of the many reasons why the Christian message is so counter-cultural.  Today we use the term “sheep” to refer to lazy conformists who can’t think for themselves, but David in Psalm 23 and Jesus in the gospels use sheep as a symbol for people who admit their dependence on God and who are humble enough to receive, as a gift, something as simple as their daily food.  Content, satisfied people don’t worry about missing out, because they trust that what their shepherd has given them is exactly what they need.

I get where Loki is coming from because I have the same desires.  I mean, I don’t want to rule the Nine Realms, but I want to be the ruler of my own life.  But I’ve learned, over and over again, that I’m a really bad ruler.  I’m a sheep.  And I think I’d be a lot happier if I just admitted that.

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food speaks

In Fear the Walking Dead, my current Sunday night TV show, a major character named Nick recently wanted to comfort a little girl whose father had been fed as a sacrifice to the infected dead.  But the little girl speaks only Spanish, and Nick speaks only English, so he ended up communicating his care by giving her a Gansito–a little individually-wrapped snack cake he obtained at some peril to his life.

In The Tale of Despereaux, a book I’m getting ready to discuss with my children’s lit students, soup is a pivotal symbol.  The cook makes a surreptitious batch of soup (which has been outlawed) as an act of courage and defiance.  The hero–a mouse–draws strength for his climactic act from a few spoonfuls of the cook’s secret soup.  And at the end of the story, the major characters, some of whom were formerly enemies, celebrate by eating soup (now legal) around a lavish dinner table.

I spent this past weekend at Virginia Beach with three of my dearest friends, and as we discussed on the last night, some of our favorite memories from the trip had to do with meals: the conversations around the table, the atmosphere in the restaurants (or outside on the patio next to the boardwalk), and, of course, the food.  At lunch on Saturday, I traded my last fried shrimp taco for the rest of one friend’s macaroni and cheese, and we both got enough joy out of this simple swap that we were still talking about it hours later.  It was an act that involved giving, receiving, and trying new things: some of life’s greatest joys.

I’ve told these stories because it’s hard to say what I want to say any other way, without resorting to platitudes.  If you’ve ever been moved to tears by a gift of food (even a vending machine snack cake), felt disproportionately happy watching people eat something you cooked, or looked forward for days to a dinner party (or a pizza and movie night), you know what I mean.

This topic isn’t as simple as I wish I could pretend it is.  Not everybody gets a warm glowy feeling from eating with other people.  Some people have dietary restrictions due to allergies, illnesses, or convictions, and other people say insensitive things to them because they can’t understand (I have said these kinds of things more often than I care to think about).  Others have eating disorders that make this a painfully thorny issue.  And we can’t ignore the fact that millions of people don’t have enough food for basic subsistence.

So I’m not going to make sweeping generalizations like “Food is a universal language.”  It’s not.  But just like anything that functions as a vehicle of communication between people (only more so, because food literally becomes part of us), food allows us to make small steps toward understanding.  Small steps like refraining from judging someone because of what they eat or don’t eat, or how they eat.  Like accepting a meal without feeling obligated to give something in return.  Like taking the time to know what a person really likes, wants, and needs.  This is how we connect with people.  This is how food speaks.

 

 

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For your listening and reading pleasure

Today, I offer you some podcasts and blogs you should check out.

  1. This one is shameless self-promotion: I was recently a guest on my colleague Clifford Stumme’s pop music podcast.  In this episode, we discuss the story arc of Mumford & Sons’s first album, Sigh No More.  In other episodes, Cliff discusses the meanings of songs by a dizzying array of artists, not all of whose music you might have thought worth taking seriously.  He shows you that pop music (a term he defines broadly) is a lot more than just a great beat you can dance to.
  2. I mentioned the podcast Does Anyone Really Need to Hear This? on my blog years ago, and I think it’s time to give it another shout-out.  Mark Stockslager (who, if you couldn’t guess by the name, is my brother) gives his often strong opinions on movies, books, TV, music, sports, and more.  His most recent episode, is a good one to start with, because in it he introduces some regular segments on some of the above-mentioned topics.  In another recent episode, he and his guests analyze–a more appropriate word would be “dismember”–the season 6 finale of The
    Walking Dead    .
  3. Another colleague recently sent me two articles from the religion, arts, and culture blog Mockingbird, based out of Christ Episcopal Church in Charlottesville, VA.  The two articles he sent me (this really long but worthwhile one and this shorter one) are both about Harry Potter (people are always sending me Harry Potter stuff, which is fine by me!), but I’m looking forward to reading what these thoughtful bloggers have to say on other topics as well.
  4. If you work at a desk on a computer all day and aren’t using Spotify Free to provide a soundtrack to your day, why aren’t you?  I mostly listen to post rock (Spotify has a good playlist for this genre) and movie scores because they don’t have lyrics to distract me, but they also aren’t boring.  As I write this, I’m listening to John Powell’s exciting scores to the How to Train Your Dragon movies.

Now you have your assignments; go read and listen!

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Can J.K. write Harry Potter fanfic?

I guess I’ll eventually need to make my official statement on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (preview: I cried twice, and not because it was bad), but today I want to write about a concept suggested by a criticism I’ve heard several people make: It feels like J. K. Rowling (and her collaborators, though they generally aren’t mentioned) is writing fan fiction.  (This is not inherently a criticism, but I think that’s generally how it’s meant.)  Personally, I didn’t feel like I was reading fanfic; I felt like I was reading a play (as I truly was), which meant that the dialogue was often self-consciously stagy.  But that’s not what I want to write about today.  Today, I want to explore the question of whether it’s possible for J. K. Rowling to write fan fiction about her own source texts.

I explored this question in my doctoral dissertation, which you can find in its entirety in the Proquest Dissertations and Theses database (just search Tess Stockslager; I’m the only one).  And my conclusion was that, yes, Rowling can–and does, on Pottermore–write Harry Potter fan fiction, because she is a Harry Potter fan.  One of the main premises of my dissertation was that Rowling (like Charles Dickens, the other author I wrote about) plays the roles of author, reader, and character with regard to her own work.  The author role is obvious; I’ll write another post sometime about the character role, but for now, let’s think about Rowling as a reader (and, I would go so far as to say, a fan) of her own work.

After the Harry Potter books were finished and the films, on which Rowling worked in an advisory capacity, were complete, Rowling made what many people interpreted as a deliberate move away from Hogwarts–almost a 360 degree turn.  Her next novel, The Casual Vacancy, is decidedly non-magical, takes a rather cynical view of human nature, and is definitely not for kids.  The same goes for the detective novels she has written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.  And in an hour-long interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2010, Rowling made it clear that she was striving for closure of the Harry Potter chapter of her life, even if it meant going through a process a lot like grieving the loss of a loved one.

But then Rowling started writing increasingly lengthy pieces for Pottermore about her character’s childhoods, their secret loves, their future careers–in other words, the stuff of fan fiction.  She wasn’t altering the plot of the seven novels or chronicling a new battle between good and evil.  She was just having fun with the characters she loves.  The Pottermore pieces hit their climax in summer 2014 with a flurry of writing from Rowling on the Quidditch World Cup, coinciding with the real-life FIFA World Cup.  After that series of pieces appeared, it seemed that Rowling was no longer interested in pretending that she was no longer interested in Harry Potter.  First we heard that she was writing the screenplay to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a film that promises to significantly broaden the scope of the wizarding world, and then we heard about Cursed Child.

And cynical people said that Rowling was doing this for the money, because Potter fans will buy anything with the lightning-bolt logo on it (that last part is true).  But that explanation for Rowling’s new HP work doesn’t make sense to me.  She doesn’t need the money.  She donated the royalties from the three Galbraith novels to a soldiers’ charity.  No, Rowling isn’t doing this for the money; she’s doing it for the same reason that anybody writes fan fiction–because she loves the world and the characters, and she doesn’t want the stories to end.  The only difference, of course, is that when Rowling writes fan fiction, the whole world pays attention.

I could say a lot more here–I could tell you about all the times when Rowling, in interviews, has used the word “love” in connection with Harry Potter, the character, and has said that he’s like a son to her.  But there’s no question in my mind that J.K. Rowling is a fan of the world she created–and not primarily because she’s the one who created it, but because it’s real to her.  Which is exactly how I feel about that world too.

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the thankfulness book

This is the next in my series of posts on crafting a rule of life.  Those of you who have been following this series will be interested (and maybe a little sad) to know that I am probably going to wrap it up after next week’s post.  However, I’ll continue to add to my rule of life and will probably blog about it from time to time in the future.

Two weeks ago I wrote about the three hours I spent in solitude, meditating on my struggle with anger and how, with God’s help, I can implement practices into my life that will help me to become less angry and more gentle.  One of the action steps that came from that session was to begin writing daily in the thankfulness journal that I started last summer during a Bible study on Ann Vosskamp’s One Thousand Gifts, a book I heartily recommend.  Like thousands of other Christian women who have read the book, I chose a beautiful journal (mine is a handcrafted one from Nepal, with a colorful woven cover and soft, fibrous pages) and started making a list of things I’m thankful for, with the eventual goal of reaching one thousand.  Like thousands of other Christian women, I faithfully wrote 2-3 items daily for a few weeks and then petered out, starting and stopping again sporadically throughout the year whenever I happened to notice the journal under a pile of other books.

As I mentioned in my solitude post, the authors of Taking Your Soul to Work connect anger (the sin) and gentleness (the fruit of the spirit) with surrendered contentment (the outcome).  After I recognized this unexpected connection, I decided that picking my thankfulness journal back up and making it a habit this time could be an effective strategy for becoming more content with the gifts I have and thereby feeling less compelled toward anger about what I don’t have and/or can’t control.  Too, writing about those seemingly out-of-nowhere gifts that come to me more often than I usually notice (e.g., a good conversation with a friend whom I “happened” to walk by when leaving a blood drive early after an unsuccessful attempt to donate) may help me see how good it is that I’m not in control of every minute of my day.

Keeping a thankfulness list isn’t just for angry people, or for women, or for people who have been inspired by Ann Vosskamp.  It’s for anyone who wants to rewire their brain circuitry to look for good things.  (There’s real science that says you can actually do this; maybe I’ll write a post about it sometime.)  And it only takes a minute or less to jot down a few items every day.  This practice can also be done with other people.  My family has a now-threadbare journal that we’ve pulled out every Thanksgiving since 1991 to record what we’ve been most thankful for during the previous year.  Reading our entries aloud together has led to much laughter, many happy tears, and deep fellowship with each other and with God.

If you think it sounds cheesy, have you actually tried it?  It won’t change you into a different person overnight, but it will gradually train your brain–and your heart, and all the rest of you–to see gifts where you didn’t before.

If you have experience with keeping a thankfulness list, or if you have ideas about how you might incorporate this simple discipline into your life, let me know in the comments!