What are you grateful for?

This morning (and all day long) I am was meant to work on my thesis... but I am exhausted and useless, and once again (as always) I got stuck in front of the internetz... and in the end I decided to start something new which is kind of simililar to Project 365. Meet Me At Mikes is a blog that I have been following, and where yesterday there was a post about a girl named Hailey who is making a film about gratitude. There was also a video included:

365grateful.com from hailey bartholomew on Vimeo.

I was so moved by the video and inspired by those beautiful polaroid photos, that I decided to join in and do my own 365 Grateful project. I would love to take one polaroid shot every day for an entire year, but films for the otherwise quite cheap and easy to find Polaroid cameras are rather expensive. A pack of film (which allows me to take 10 photos) costs 10 Euros (and I have to order and have them delivered from Holland), so the entire project would cost me €365. That's a whole lot of money that I could spend on so many other things, for example on a DSLR camera... So no Polaroids for me, unfortunately, but instead I am sticking with my good old digital camera, for the next few months, anyway. 

As I have mentioned, the Grateful project is quite similar to Project 365, however, this time the emphasis is not on photography, but, obviously, on gratitute. Each day I will write a short post about what or who I am grateful for on that particular day, and a photo will accompany the words. However, the picture will only be a visual aid, documenting/illustrating the grateful thing, hence it will have less of an artistic and more of a documentary purpose. There will probably be days with crappy photos with absolutely no artistic/aesthetic value, but that's normal, since this time the point is to find the beauty in the tiniest details, to find the source of joy in places you never thought they would be. 

I think I am a grateful person, I love life, I am totally aware  of how lucky I am to be where I am now, being surrounded with so many lovely, inspiring people. Yet, I fill that this new project can bring me new things (if I am patient enough to hold on and hold out for an entire year), and by next April I will have found out a lot about me and the way I perceive life... well, we will see.

Anyway, I have already created a blog for the project, you can find it here: http://365thingsiamgratefulfor.blogspot.com/

This is my 5th (:O) blog, actually. I take up way too much space in the blogosphere, but just as I have several separate notebooks for different kind of notes I take, I like to keep my different online thoughts, musings, photos, and projects separated.

If you are interested in the original 365 Grateful project, please visit 365grateful.com where there's a lot of useful info about how the idea had came about and how it has developed into a world-wide project. On this flickr page you can view each and every one of the photos Hailey took during her year of Gratitude. 

There is also a thing called Gratitude journal, you can read about it here.