Practising Gratitude

I'm not sure where in my continous walk of learning to be a bit of a follower of Jesus I picked up the habit of gratitude.  When I was truly bored - and it was a horrible time at work - I tried to find 50 things to be grateful for at a time.  Lists usually included coffee, chocolate, books, Jesus, the bible and disintegrated into duvet, the bin men, buttercups and just about anything else I could find - 50 is a big list! A friend of mine said (rather cynically) that finding 3 things a day to be grateful for over 365 days would be very challenging.  I'm tempted to try it.  An excuse for a new notebook.  I'm fairly convinced that habitually looking for things to be grateful for is doing interesting things to my brain and rewiring this natural pessimist into a slightly more sunny and positive version - although to be fair, this may be the work of God's spirit! Certainly I did it through gritted teeth when I had a puncture and found the spare tyre also had a screw in it and the repair man took an hour and a half on a very sticky day!   But I was grateful I didn't have my new manager in the car, which would have been the case a week later for a scones and cream motivational afternoon.  I am not sure about the management blather but scones and cream can motivate me any time!