When I was a kid, I was really fussy. My mom tells me that I hated to have a messy face, wouldn't wear mismatched pajama tops and bottoms, and most crazily of all, refused to eat cookies if they had cracks in them!
I know, what was I, insane?!
Really, it was just that I was a perfectionist. Which, for some things, I still am, but for others, I've learned to be more lax.
Anyhow, this morning, I was catching up my blog when I had the mad notion that I should just double-check that I had the current day number correct.
I didn't. Somewhere along the way, I lost 3 days. Today is the 316th day of the year.
For a moment, I got really annoyed. I went back in my blog entries, about a month, trying to find wherever-it-was that I'd somehow goofed things up.
Then I realized that it didn't matter. This is a blog, a sort of mental experiment, about which I'm accountable to myself, and not anyone or anything else. What's more, there's a whole eastern aesthetic in Japanese art called wabi-sabi which is exactly about embracing imperfections as a sort of beauty. The cracks in the cookie don't make it bad - they make it unique. The three days missing from this practice of mine are much the same.
When I first started doing this project, I was doing it on twitter and Facebook. Then I ditched Facebook, and started this blog. Now I'm regularly posting here, updating twitter and google+ too. Somewhere in all that mishmash, I lost 3 days.
It's okay.
I've actually come to love writing here at my blog, where I can really let loose when I feel like it. Plus, I love the fact that it's easy for me to go back many days and re-read. I've already decided that I need to do this gratitude thing again, next year. Losing the three days, that just makes it even more clear to me.
Next year, I'll try to NOT miss or lose any days. I like to think of it as refining my blog-cookie making technique. This year's batch has three cracks in it.
Still tastes pretty good.