May Day Resolution

I like to write – a lot. I am sure that many of you are surprised, because over the last few months, I have only posted less than a few dozen times. But I have a new May Day resolution to start a fresh and focus on blogging instead of my journal.

Typically I write three pages in my journal every morning. I have been doing this for the last ten years or so. I have a large collection of those black and white composition notebooks that runs across the bottom shelf in my bedroom. For the most part, you can easily track down what I was thinking about in my journal. I begin everyday the same with the day of the week, date and time.

In the last few years, I added a fourth page of two lists. A thank you list and a help me list. I begin by writing down Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Three times – just like that. Number down ten rows and then skip one line for the following: Help me! Help me! Help me! I consider this sort of like a prayer list, where I lay my blessings and worries out on the page so that I can get on with my day. This idea came from reading Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies, an excellent book on faith.

I still have my childhood journals featuring our daily ritual to spend five minutes writing at the beginning of every class. I rekindled this addiction to writing when I was introduced to the exercise by Julia Cameron in her famous book The Artist’s Way. I started the book sometime in 1998 and never made it past Week 4. That is supposed to be a very difficult week to make it through, because you have to give up all forms of reading. I was warned this by someone who had taken a class. So I knew going into it that a lot of people struggle at this point. The next time I picked up the book, I persevered. And by the seventh or eighth week, I was addicted. As my husband has told me on numerous occasions, I love making lists, thinking about the future, and even though he didn’t say this, day-dreaming. I am an ideas person and I can visualize all of the wonderful things that life has to offer in my mind’s eye.

However today, I had the realization that maybe I have OD’d on Julia Cameron. Jessica wrote me admitting that she has writer’s block. It was funny because I had the same realization that I needed to stop around the same time while eating lunch. Over the last ten years, I have completed The Artist’s Way at least twice, listened to The Vein of Gold on tape, worked through The Sound of Paper and another twelve weeks of Walking in this World. I think that all of these books are great. I love to do the exercises. They are not for everyone, but for some they are life-changing. I highly recommend her work to anyone who is the least bit intrigued. But for me, I need to realize that they are about helping you transition from a place you are not so excited about to exactly where you want to be. And I am finally there. I just haven’t realized that I am ready to take my training wheels off yet. So now I am.

So instead of dedicating every morning to three pages in my journal, I am going to dedicate the same amount of time to my blog. I have finally heard the threats from my friends that they are going to stop reading my blog since I never update it. And I hope to present you with some of the more interesting events that I observe in the world around me. I am looking forward to it. Stay tuned for more exciting ideas to come…