Gratitude experiment reflections on day 27

Today is Saturday, April 12th, 2025, and today was day 27 of our experiment with real gratitude with a focus on ordinary magic inside the Patreon group. This is the first experiment that we've done together, well, at all. I was going to say it's the first live experiment that we've done together, but it's the first experiment that this group has done together at all, and I didn't know what to expect, either for them as individuals and also for us as a group. It's been long enough since I have done my own experiment that I was also kind of unsure, especially as we come up into summer, which is notoriously the hardest time of the year for me, what to expect for myself either.

Happily, the experiment started off well, I mean, even better than I'd hoped, honestly. I know to expect that when starting a new experiment, things can be a little slow in the beginning, and it might feel harder for me to find whatever it is that I'm experimenting, in this case, the real gratitude and that interaction with ordinary magic at the same time. But this time, I didn't experience that. It's almost like no time at all has passed since my last experiment, and I was able to jump right into it. So that was relief.

I think there was only one day out of the 27 days so far, and we're doing a total of 30 for this experiment, but I think there was only one day that I really just legitimately did not have an experience that felt worth reporting on, so to speak. I was just not a good day, and there really was nothing that I could call out without resorting to the fallback of the intellectualizing of gratitude, and that's exactly what I didn't want to do, and that's exactly what I was telling everybody in the group. This is not what we're after. We want real gratitude, which is why I specified real gratitude. That's what we're playing with. That's what we're experimenting with. I only had one day, which is amazing.

And then today, I had my evening reminder come up to do my documentation, so I pulled up Joplin, made my note, and realized that there wasn't any one particular moment that I wanted to call out from the day. It was more just a feeling of overall peace and contentment, and when I say those words, I recognize that they can feel kind of fluffy and kind of ungrounded and kind of like, oh, that's nice, I guess, but no, really, it is nice. It's nice in a way that many things aren't. It's nice in the way that home-cooked comfort foods are nice compared to mass-produced cookies. Do you know what I mean? It's nice in a way that's nourishing and fulfilling and nurturing.

It was just so good. It was just so good, and I'm so, yeah, grateful to have had the experience and to be doing this experiment so that I recognized it and could really acknowledge it consciously and feel into it and soak it in like a sponge, because tomorrow might be different.