I don’t know about you, but I’m loving the “Month of Thankfulness” status updates on Facebook a whole lot more than the stormy political ones that dominated my news feed for the past six weeks.

But I decided not to participate. While I’m fully on board with being purposefully thankful, there’s also something that doesn’t sit quite right with me about that label, a “month” of thankfulness. As if the rest of the year we don’t need to be thankful as long as we publicly announce the things we’re thankful for leading up to Thanksgiving.

Now, I know that isn’t the spirit in which people are approaching it! But Danny and I have a different approach, too: Every day, many times a day, we’ll just say almost incredulously to each other, “We are so blessed,” or “We have such a good life.” We’ll say, “We love each other so much!” over and over. We’ll remind ourselves out loud, “God is so, so good to us,” and “We don’t deserve this.” And we’ll be specific. “We are so grateful to have such wonderful clients in this job we love and share.” “We’re so blessed to have our home.” “We have such wonderful friends and family!” “What a blessing to have two cars that work great.”

Have you ever heard of Charles Horton Cooley’s sociological principal of the “looking glass self”? That a person becomes what he sees society reflect back to him as his “self”? I believe in this concept wholeheartedly. I also believe that it works from the inside out. Danny and I want to be grateful people, because we know we are blessed beyond measure and share a wonderful life. And the more times we remind ourselves, the more we will see that that is what we are.This is what I see on my dresser every morning when I wake up. No, it isn’t the most technically correct photo or the best print job, and I do look rather lobster-ish, although I promise I’d been slathering on the sunscreen! It’s just a snapshot taken by a friendly teenaged deckhand on a little sailboat when Danny and I were on our honeymoon in St. Lucia. The smiles on our faces say the exact same thing as the word on the frame. We were in love. We were so happy. We don’t ever want to feel any different. So we remind ourselves constantly just how happy and in love we are. And we believe it every time.

That is honestly one of my favorite things about my life: Recognizing blessings. It’s kind of hard to enjoy blessings if you don’t stop to consider them, and it’s much easier to savor something when you realize you should truly be thankful.

PS: There’s one other thing I’m super thankful for this week. I have finally, at long last, gotten Danny to actually sit down and watch Arrested Development and concede that it is one of the funniest TV shows ever. So it has really been a great week!

~ Laura