Three Things

My choir teacher died at the end of last year.

His name was Norman Smith. He taught me to sing when I was five. Not just the mechanics, but the harder part: believing my voice was worth hearing.

I hadn’t seen him in years. We weren’t close in the adult way. I didn’t write letters or visit. But I followed him on Facebook and watched his life unfold in small squares on my phone. Grandchildren. His garden. Trips to the coast.

And every day, without fail, he posted three things he was grateful for.

Not profound things. The light through his kitchen window. A phone call from an old student. The first tomato of the season. Coffee at the right temperature. His wife’s laugh.

I scrolled past these posts for years. They were part of the texture of my feed, constant and easy to miss.

Then he died.

I sat at my kitchen table and cried for a man I hadn’t talked to in fifteen years.

After, I scrolled back through his old posts. All those gratitude lists. Hundreds of them. Years of daily noticing. And I thought: I want to do that. I want to pick up what he put down.

So I started.

Every morning, three things. Sometimes posted publicly. Sometimes just in a notebook. A good cup of tea. My daughter’s laugh down the hallway. Clouds turning pink over Mt. Hood.

It helped. On hard mornings, a small anchor. On good mornings, an amplifier. Either way, it pulled me out of my head and into the actual texture of my day.

And then I stopped.

No single reason. No dramatic breaking point. Life piled up. Work stress. Kid stress. The ordinary weight of trying to hold too many things. Somewhere in the middle, the daily practice slipped away. First one day, then a week, then gone.

I didn’t notice at first. You don’t miss a practice until you’re deep in the hole, looking for the ladder, realizing you kicked it away.

The hard season lasted a long time. And somewhere in the middle of it, lying awake at three in the morning with anxiety’s hands around my chest, I thought about Norman Smith. About his lists. About how he did it every day, even the hard ones.

And I got it: the practice wasn’t for when life was good. The practice was the thing that could have helped when life got hard. That’s why he did it every day.

I’d been waiting to feel grateful before practicing gratitude. Backwards.

So I’m starting again. Not a resolution. Just a quiet return to something that worked.

This morning I woke up early. The puppy needed to go out. She’s all legs and ears and enthusiasm. No concept of sleeping in. I took her outside in the dark and stood on the lawn while she investigated every blade of grass.

I live in a 400-unit building in Portland. Not the kind of place you’d expect to have a view. But I got lucky. From my apartment I can see the Willamette River. The bridges strung across it. Mt. Hood on clear mornings.

This morning was clear. The sunrise came up gold, then pink, then blue. The mountain caught the light. The river reflected it back. The puppy finished her investigations and leaned against my legs. And I stood there, half-asleep in my bathrobe, and thought: this is one of my three things.

Later I’ll drive my kids to school. They’re at the age where they still like me, mostly. I coach my oldest’s Oregon Battle of the Books team, which means hours talking about novels with nine-year-olds who have strong opinions about plot structure. They argue about characters like they’re real people. They get upset about sad endings. They care so much about made-up stories. It’s the best thing I’ve ever been part of.

That’s another one. The kids. The way they take stories seriously. The way they haven’t learned to pretend things don’t matter.

The third is harder to pin down. It’s standing on the lawn with my puppy, watching the sunrise, knowing I get to be here for this. That I woke up. That my body works well enough to walk outside. That I have a place to live and a river to look at and a mountain on the horizon. That I have kids who want to be around me and a dog who loves me with all that uncomplicated dog devotion.

It’s knowing this is temporary. That Norman Smith stood in his own kitchen and watched light come through his own window, and now he doesn’t. That someday I won’t either. Not a sad thought. A true one. One that makes the light through the window matter more.

I think that’s why he did it. The daily practice. Paying attention to what’s good doesn’t cost anything, and it gives you something to hold onto when hard things come. Evidence that your life is worth living, collected one observation at a time.

Three things. Not ten, not a hundred. Just three. Specific enough to mean something. Short enough to do.

The coffee in my mug. My daughter singing when she thinks no one’s listening. The ridiculous optimism of my puppy, who believes every walk will be the best one yet.

I don’t know if Norman Smith thought about legacy when he posted those lists. I suspect not. I suspect he was just a man doing a small thing that made his life better, sharing it in case it helped someone else.

He taught me to sing, a long time ago. He taught me my voice was worth hearing.

Now he’s teaching me something else. That attention is practice. That gratitude is a muscle. That small things aren’t small.

So here I am. Starting again. Three things, every day.

Try it if you want. Not because I know what’s best. Just because it helped me once, and I think it might help me again, and maybe it’ll help you too.

Here’s what I’m grateful for today.

What about you?