What 10 years of blogging has taught me . . .

Word for the Day 

Gratefulness draws on the best of the human spirit in all of us. 
It renews and refreshes us, and best of all it is contagious. 

-Amy Edelstein- 

This is officially my last habitual post here on Habitual Gratitude. You can still find me blogging on my new website A Late Bloomer Living Gratefully. This blog won’t be gone. Hanging out on the world wide web, I will be revisiting it and inviting readers to keep checking out the other 2,820 posts that reside here. 

It was time for a change though. Learning a new platform is challenging and full of fear at times, but it is also invigorating. Comfortable and complacent here, I am revitalized by a shift to a website that allows a broader approach to my writing. My new website, like me, is a work in progress and will take time to bloom fully. 

My body of work, published and unpublished, is expansive. I can share more of it, and contain it in one place, at A Late Bloomer Living Gratefully. The flow of gratefulness continues. 

Ten years of blogging has taught me so much as a writer and as a person striving to live gratefully. Gratefulness runs deeper and richer in me. Here on Habitual Gratitude, I regularly put my own gratitudes at the top of posts, and then go on to take a reflective look, at the significance and insignificance of it all. I better understand the idea that "only the disciplined are free." 

What we practice grows stronger talks about a key concept in any endeavor. My writing has grown stronger. My gratefulness muscle-which runs between my head, heart, and soul-has grown more flexible and pronounced. Healthy thinking, generative energy, right-sized ego, and much more are the fruits of this labor. This is what a labor of love looks like in printed form: 

There is one more book to add to this pile. Today's post is only an end in one sense. It's really a continuation more than anything else. A continuation of writing to savor the present moment, the little things that are really the big things, and to honor my transforming and writing self. Embracing the late bloomer within, I continue to live gratefully. A day at a time. A moment at a time.

Thank you to my faithful readers and a special thank you to Steve Foran, my first reader and commenter here who was someone I didn't know personally. Ten years later, Steve and I have never met, but consider ourselves friends and fellow travelers and advocates of living gratefully. 

Gratitude is always possible.

Gratitude shared is gratitude multiplied.

Gratefulness doesn't shield us from life's challenges. It does help us through them though. 

Living gratefully connects us to ourselves, others, and the world around us. It generates compassionate energy and a sense of belonging in a world that sorely needs both.

Onward!