Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it. ~ Confucius

Three Questions, 365 Days

I created the three questions approach while attempting to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail in 2014. The three questions are:

What was the most beautiful thing I saw (encountered) today?

What did I learn today?

What made me happy today?

These questions were created for a couple of purposes. First, I have always been frustrated by the fact that when I travel I fall behind in my journaling, then end up trying to catch up and often end up missing days during the trip. I wanted a way to capture each day in a way that I would even be willing to complete at the end of long days when I was tired, and a method that I could use to easily catch up if I missed a day.

In preparing for the Appalachian Trail, I did the physical training, I bought all the right gear, set up food drops and bought the best map/guide for the trail, AWOL’s guide to the Appalachian Trail. I also read a lot of books about hiking the trail. The one thing that hit me that I wasn’t prepared for, was the mental aspect of the trail. How would I keep my positivity when things got really hard? The three questions fit my journaling criteria but also served an additional purpose, by recording these positive thoughts at the end of the day they acted as a reminder, even on the really hard days that good things were happening every day. And because I knew I would be answering these questions at the end of the day, it made me think more about and focus on the beautiful, happy things that I encountered throughout the day. I changed the first question from the original beautiful thing I saw each day, to the most beautiful thing I encountered. Sometimes the most beautiful thing was a sound, a smell or an act of kindness.

This approach was incredibly helpful on the trail when things got hard, and they did, right out of the gate. As I talk about in my book Appalachian Trail Happiness, it rained, sleeted and snowed for 17 of the first 21 days on the trail and I nearly quit. Keeping my positivity in any little way, helped make my trip more enjoyable and even possible. I wrote about this in a post after I came off of the trail.

As I’ve written about lately I’ve been going through a tough time, honestly I pretty much shutdown over the last three weeks. I haven’t been very happy, and that’s not acceptable to me, especially as the Minister of Happiness. Over the last few weeks I’ve gotten away from all of the things I know I have to do to maintain my happiness. I haven’t been eating right, exercising consistently enough, my sleep has been off and I just generally have not been very productive, nor motivated in any way to be productive.

So over the Thanksgiving holiday I’ve started working back to what I need to do as I prepare to meet for a surgical consult later this week. Over the holiday I made really good food. I love Thanksgiving, love cooking and eating and did a whole lot of both over the last four days. Including harvesting what are likely my last garden tomatoes of the year and with basil I grow, turning them into a lovely Caprese salad. These tomatoes may have actually been the tastiest all year so I was really happy about the salad.

This weekend I’ve made progress on everything I know I’m supposed to do, getting back into my routines and getting back on track. I also made a decision to write my next book. I’ve been toying with various book ideas related to the MOH blog and none of them really resonated well with me. Hell I even wrote a full first draft of one and scrapped it. This weekend I decided to return to the three questions idea. Right now I really need that daily reminder and boost and it provides some really great material to write around. I’ll also try to kick them up to the blog regularly as well.

So here’s to a little bit of a new start, and my project to answer the three questions every day for the next year and hopefully during a whole lot of happy days my friends. ~ Rev Kane