New Year, New Me, Part 3 ~ The Habits

Inspired by this post, I decided to start tracking my daily habits in my bullet journal. 

My habit list included things I already did (though not necessarily daily) like 10,000 steps and swimming, things I want to do more of (writing, time in nature) and a whole new morning routine, inspired by this post, by the same blogger. Her routine of 'SAVERS' is made up of silence, affirmation, visualization, exercise, reading, and scribing.

I know some people say not to start too many habits at once, but I found having a great big habit list to be liberating, because I can always accomplish at least something on the list, and if I get to the end of the day without getting much of anything done, I can eat a carrot and x off "5 a day" or drink a couple glasses of water and mark off "hydrate." I also added "reading" to the list partway through the month, not because I need encouragement to read, but I was curious how often I do (turns out, pretty much every day).

I'm surprised how well I did in January, and that the morning routine was the most successful part. It's nice starting the day off well. I have some glaring blanks, however, most notably under "gratitude" and "kindness." I've already talked about how hard gratitude is for me, but I've decided that if I focus on a specific event (I'm grateful my son asked how my day went), rather than a general state of being, I can fool the evil gods.



Kindness threw up a similar roadblock: what exactly is kind? Is it kind to pick up someone's papers off the photocopier and take them to them, or is it just nosy? Is it kind to let a car in ahead of you when you've got nowhere in particular to be, or does it only count if you're in a hurry? Is it kind to treat your kids and husband well, even though that's what you're supposed to do? I don't know why (I think it's my Catholic upbringing), but it seems like an act of kindness is only really kindness if you don't want to do it. I see I'm going to need to work on that.

At the end of January, I realized my habits fell into five general categories--morning, health, nature, brain, and being a good person (I don't have one-word phrase for that yet)--and I arranged my February list accordingly. My morning routine evolved from SAVERS to YSAVRS, for: Yoga (I have book of different yoga routines for each day of the week, each taking about 10 minutes, which is all I have time for), Silence (about a 3-breath meditation is all I can manage), Affirmation (I still find these pretty corny, but I'm going with it), Visualization (I'm a natural daydreamer, so this is easy for me), Read a Poem (I've wanted to get more poetry in my life for a long time, but it doesn't work for me to read poem after poem after poem; one a day sets just the right tone), scribble (a paragraph dashed off in my journal--much more accurate and realistic, and less fusty that "scribe").

Speaking of habits, I gave up on the Gretchen Ruben book. I hate to say it, but it was kind of ... boring. Or maybe she was boring--every time she described some trait about herself, like wearing the same type of clothes every day, not liking travel, only eating plain food I was like, "Gah! I don't think I want to take this woman's advice for fear of turning into her." So I returned it to the library.

The Mother-Writer Series, Post I: Alicia Ostriker

"The writer who is a mother should, I think, record everything she can: make notes, keep journals, take photographs, use a tape recorder, and remind herself that there is a subject so incalculably vast significance to humanity, about which virtually nothing is known because writers have not been mothers."

––Alicia Ostriker
"A Wild Surmise: Motherhood and Poetry"
Writing Like a Woman, 1983

Z got up early Saturday morning to make us the breakfast he'd been planning all week--fruit salad and smoothies (I  helped him cut the pineapple and made some muffins to help fill people who are not fruitatarians up). He HATES having his picture taken, but consented to putting his arm within viewfinder range long enough for me to snap a single photo.

Inspiring Things

To counteract yesterday's melancholy post, I thought I'd share some things that have inspired me of late.

Some prescient posts on nurturing your own creative self:

Lisa Romeo on finding making time to write.

Project-Based Homeschooling for Grownups.

Books I'm reading for my project on mother-nature writers:

Kathleen Dean Moore, Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water and Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World

Lia Purpura, Increase

Pattiann Rogers, The Dream of the Marsh Wren: Writing as Reciprocal Creation

Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

And, totally not related to my project or grad school in any way, Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother?:A Comic Drama. I picked it up at the library yesterday on my way home from work and read half of it in the bathtub last night (my kids make fun of me for reading in the tub, but really I can't think of a more pleasant place to read, except maybe in a hammock on a warm, sunny, bug-free day). Complicated and fascinating (Virginia Woolf & Donald Winnicott). It makes me grateful I had a boring/normal childhood and also makes me wish I could draw. Read Fun Home first, if you haven't.

What inspires you these days?