#ThankADay for Twitter: A Patchwork of Gratitude

“The thing I am working on has been dealing out epiphanies quite liberally these last couple months. Life is beautiful (and cheesy).” — Buster Benson

If you’re on Twitter, you’re cordially invited to join me by using the #ThankADay hashtag to tweet (at least once a day) your gratitude for something going on in your life, or a person, or a non-profit, or a business, or a book, or an idea that helped you in 2011, and that might help other people also.

Social media enables us to thank and compliment one another. Too often those acknowledgements are self-serving, but often enough, the praise heals old wounds between friends, acquaintances, and current or former co-workers. It also provides free publicity to companies and organizations and entrepreneurs who deserve attention. I won’t be posting my #ThankADay tweets to Facebook because Facebook has a different atmosphere. I love Facebook, but I feel more self-conscious on Facebook, and maybe other people who use Twitter and Facebook feel that way also. Twitter’s an impulsive, goofy lovenest.

I got the idea for #ThankADay from Dr. Sherry Pagoto, an associate professor at UMass Medical School. Among her areas of expertise are psychiatric co-morbidities of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and metabolic syndrome, AND the lifestyle interventions that address these chronic illnesses. I’m grateful to her for being an encouraging, informative voice in the Twitter fitness community. She’s best-known there for launching #PlankADay. More than a Twitter hashtag, #PlankADay is a friendly competition to promote an abdominal exercise that should permanently unseat the crunch because it’s easier on the back and works the arms simultaneously. (Not that I’m a certified trainer or anything, but I’ve heard this said and read it said by the pros).

I began #PlankADay on August 25 and haven’t broken my streak yet. You do at least one plank a day, and then tweet to record it, and there’s a leaderboard. Check out Sherry’s PlankADay Revolution page for the full 411 on this. I also like her FU Diet, which is an un-diet.

One technical note for people unfamiliar with Twitter–if you join and decide to do this, just type #ThankADay somewhere in your thankfulness tweet. People often put it in at the end of the tweet. And my Twitter name is @GoalsGamified.

Thank you for reading this, and any other Text Isle Patchwork blog posts that you happen to click onto. My blog is exactly one-year-and-a-day-old today. My first post was about NaNoWriMo, a friendly challenge in which writers try to write a whole novel in the month of November, or at least to get a rough draft done.

(Oh, one more thing, in honor of my one-year-and-a-day-old blog, I want to recommend Leslie Pietrzyk‘s novel A Year and a Day.
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