A Year of Gratitude – January 24, 2024

Gratitude can be self made. I believe that we can all choose to be grateful for something we do, a choice we make, as well as being grateful for the gifts both big and small that life gives us.

Today, I am grateful for choosing to accept something unwelcome without allowing it to determine my mood for the rest of the day. That might sound like a small thing, but if you have ever allowed a small event to cloud your entire day, you know that it can seem nearly impossible.

Emma and I are knitting every day here at the farmhouse to create our hand knit hats for The Mercantile Shop. We love to knit, but we’re knitting as swiftly as we can and still struggling to keep up. That’s a wonderful reality because it means that you love our hats as much as we do, but it means that we try to plan our time as efficiently as possible.

I usually knit in the morning. It’s a nice, meditative way to begin my day. Emma knits at night, finding it to be a nice way to end her day. Neither one of us wanted to make the sort of discovery in this photo.

After an hour of knitting, after just getting to the point of the hat where the beautiful cable pattern starts to take shape, we discovered this. This soft, pretty pink wool blend yarn must have passed over a roller or machine that left grease behind. It’s too much to ignore, too deep in the fiber to attempt to remove.

The only thing to do from here is to take a deep breath, frog at least half of the work, cut out the damaged fiber, join it together, and keep knitting. It’s frustrating. It’s disappointing. But it can be fixed and so many problems in our days can’t be.

So, instead of letting this moment of frustration, the lost time, and the time ahead spent to simply bring this back to the starting point darken my day, I’m going to be grateful that this is a small problem. It can be fixed. It will be mended. I will have a good day in spite of this because I can choose to.

Instead of focusing on the smudgy unwelcome stain, I’ll focus on how pretty this ballet pink yarn is, how soft it feels in my hands, and how gorgeous this hat will be when Emma an I finish it.

Find your gratitude today even if you have to look for it. It’s there. I promise.

This post is part of our A Year of Gratitude Series. You can find the introduction, inspiration, and entire year’s gratitude’s posts here.