One Beautiful Thing a Day

My wish for you for 2024

As I write this, it’s almost New Year’s Eve … and I imagine people everywhere are working on their resolutions or goals or intentions for 2024. (Are you?)

It has been a topic of nearly every counseling session I’ve had with my clients this week, for sure. In one form or another, over and over, the same questions came up:

• What would you like to manifest for 2024?

• What one thing do you need to do differently next year?

As the calendar turns to a new year, we all seem to feel that magnetic pull to look ahead. New possibilities, right around the corner. New beginnings. We’re assessing the old year and anticipating the new one.

It reminds me of Janus, the Roman god of doorways and transitions, who gave his name to our month of January. Janus’ two faces look in both directions at the same time—past and future. He stands with us at the gateway from one year to the next.

Me? I haven’t made New Year’s resolutions for years.

Like many of us, I’ve found them to be phantasms—well-intentioned but illusory promises that end up on the rubbish pile by February 1st. And then we feel like failures, because we didn’t follow through. Which compounds the futility of it all.

Quite a few years ago, I shifted to something else.

Every January 1st, I pick up a new, empty little spiral notebook and open it to the first page. This will be where I record, each day of the coming 365, One Beautiful Thing that I saw/heard/sensed/experienced that day. Something that moved my soul or gave me a jolt of joy.

One day per page, One Beautiful Thing.

The pages are small so I don’t write an essay. It’s the barest, simplest description of my One Beautiful Thing that day—only a sentence, or a phrase.

It might be a cardinal I saw, flitting from branch to branch in a pine tree. Or a sunset that lit up the western sky in a glorious canvas of pastels. A phone call from my daughter, maybe, or an unexpected card that came in the mail.

One day, years ago, my One Beautiful Thing was a shaggy white dog in a car beside me at a red light, his head stuck out the window, pink tongue tasting the air. Pure bliss! Wild freedom!

I only saw him for five seconds before the light turned green, but that was enough.

Many people keep a gratitude journal, in which they write daily reminders of what they’re grateful for. Or they do the Three Good Things exercise, which comes from Positive Psychology, a newer field of mental health research that focuses on counteracting our built-in negativity bias. (For years now, I’ve been assigning a daily Three Good Things practice to many of my clients. It’s particulary helpful for depression, but also anxiety.)

In 2011, I devised a daily practice for myself that’s a bit different.

One Beautiful Thing a Day combines gratitude with mindfulness, awareness, and joy. It asks you to notice whatever lovely surprise might present itself to you during the course of a day, and to remember it so you can write it down later.

More than a decade into this experiment (I’m about to start Year 14), this has become one of the anchor practices of my daily life. Here’s how I do it:

• Each morning, I open last year’s One Beautiful Thing notebook to today’s date. I read what I wrote on this day last year. For a moment, I relive that memory. Inevitably, there’s a flush of gratitude for my life, for the blessings that flow.

• Each evening, I open this year’s One Beautiful Thing notebook and write today’s date on a new page. I think back over the day and land on one thing that was special. I write it down.

Yeah. It’s that simple.

One more thing, though. This is something that surprised me, that I hadn’t anticipated.

Because I know I’ll need One Beautiful Thing to write down each night, I’m always on the lookout for it. Every waking moment, my radar is scanning the environment for blessings. Which, of course, keeps me focused on the good. It turns me into a natural optimist.

And in that magical moment of a day when the One Beautiful Thing appears:

• a car pulls up next to me at a stoplight and a shaggy dog sticks his head out the window

• I walk into my kitchen in the dark at 2 a.m. to get a drink of water and there’s silky white moonlight spilling all over the floor

• a cool breeze lifts my hair off my sweat-soaked neck on a hot summer day

My heart leaps up in acknowledgment and I think,

“Oh !!!!! Here it is, my One Beautiful Thing for today. Wow, and thank you!”

The One Beautiful Thing practice is my guarantee that every single day will have at least one lightning bolt of aliveness, that I will go to bed aware that some beautiful thing—no matter how tiny or how momentary—dropped into my life during those 24 hours.

I’m a happier person for doing this, no question.

DEAR READERS: My wish for you, for 2024, is that each day will contain at least One Beautiful Thing. May you notice them all, may you rejoice in them, may they enrich your life.

See you next year, here in Rx Nature!