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Gratitude Project Process


I started making a list of the people that have really influenced me and I decided a couple of things.  I won’t place rules on the project because, it is mine and I can do whatever I would like, but perhaps I can explain what I intend so that there will be some clarity.  First of all, I don’t think that I want to write about family members.  I may later but for right now I want to focus on outside influences.  I can’t fathom writing about the influence of family members.  They have influenced me in too many ways to write and I feel like I would certainly come up short trying to express the entirety of their influence.  Second, there are a few people on my list that are still in my life in various ways.  Some I encounter frequently and interact with through work or in the community.  I am hesitant to write about these individuals because I don’t want to influence our current relationship or appear to be trying to influence them in any way.  However some of them were truly significant to me at some important point in my life.  So, my plan for now is to write about them only in the past tense, ignoring our current relationship and focusing on those things that they did in the past that have shaped my path.  Lastly, I am going to be careless about the order of my writing.  I started to worry about people perhaps reading this and feeling sad that there was not a story about them, not that anybody will really read it or care.  Yet I realized that there are close friends and associates that may not appear here for a very long time, if ever, but who have influenced me greatly.  I have come to terms with the fact that this is not about pleasing or gratifying all of the countless people that have blessed my life.  So if you are missing from the list so far, don’t worry about it.  It does not mean that you do not rank highly on my list of influencers.  It just means that I have not written about you in a blog.  If I do write about you, know that I thank you for the way that you influenced me. 
It may be interesting to note that there are people on the list that I commonly disagree with, some that I don’t even get along with, but at some point they influenced me in an important way.
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