There are two very distinct mindsets I struggle with when thinking of which book to read next. The friction between those strategies is what’s led me to my post today.

The first and most natural mindset is to go with something new that I haven’t read before. When living this mindset I build a huge library of books in which I read each once, file away key points, and then set them aside. This mindset is why I have almost 200 audiobooks in my online libraries as well as stacks upon stacks of books at work and home.

The second mindset is to really drill down on a specific book. I read it, re-read it, re-re-read it, re-re-re-read it, and so on. By the time I’ve truly consumed it I’ve read the paper copy at least half a dozen times and listened to the audio copy four or more times. In diving that deeply into it I’m able to better grasp the info and apply it to life. When this is the mindset I’m choosing my brain is forced to work harder to stay focused on staying the course instead of going for something new and shiny.

One of the original intentions of my blog was to write about my gratitude for something unique each day. In many ways I thought that being grateful for Becky, the boys, my family, my friends, and so on would have been very repetitive and too easy. There wouldn’t be much of a stretch to write about why I was thankful for something I’m already regular thankful for. I knew each day would get progressively more difficult and I counted on that as a way to increase my gratitude practice.

As I started really dissecting my day I kept coming back to the same challenge. While I had three very distinct topics I was most grateful for they were things I’ve blogged about in the past. They are a bit off the beaten path and haven’t come up often, but they’ve already been written about nonetheless. This left me at a quandary… blog about one of them again or find something different. Sure there are other things to I was grateful for but they would have rung a little hollow. I must follow my heart on this one.

That left me with three topics to attempt to blog about. Each one alone would be worthy of one of my much longer posts, yet by diving too deeply into all three each would have lost some of their luster. They each deserve their own moment in the spotlight… which they kind of each have had in the past.

Still scratching my head I couldn’t help but smile as I saw the common theme binding them all into one. Today I am thankful for repeats of past posts.

When left to my own devices I will naturally lean towards reading many different books. I enjoy variety and it provides a very wide foundation to work from. When there’s something truly important I switch to the deep dive and read and re-read the book over and over to attempt to understand the complexities and subtleties otherwise missed in the fast read. My daily blog often is more like the strategy of reading many books. Sometimes it is okay to dive deeply into one or two key gratitudes as there are so many levels to unpack.

That’s where I’ve landed today. I’m grateful for those times when I want to repeat past posts. In some of those posts I find I’m starting to get the lesson but there is so much deeper I could go into my gratitude with them. Today I could have easily written about being grateful for:

• The story of Jesus praying in Gethsemane
• Actively pursuing a dream rather than crossing my fingers and sitting back
• The lesson of remembering the why of the story rather than just the details

Just a hunch, I’l be writing about each of these in coming days and weeks even though I’ve written about them in the past. There is just so much to dive into in each that they are well worth repeating. I’m very grateful for blog posts that scream to be repeated, that’s were the learning is!

Thanks!!!