Recalibrating
My January practice
Journal: 6 January, 2024, morning.
January is my recalibration month. One thing I do in January is to just do things differently. All kinds of things. “Beginner’s mind,” you know, and having fresh eyes. I sat in a different row on the opposite side of the church at Friday early Mass (don’t laugh, it’s harder than you’d imagine) and it felt WRONG. It was distracting. If you don’t believe me, try it. We are all creatures of habit, more than we realize. Part of the “wrongness” feeling was that everyone else sat on the opposite side from me and so I was all alone over there by myself and that was oddly unsettling.
In January I practice changing as much as I can think of to change. I eat different things, I cook differently, I change how I do things around the house, I move things around, I read different things, and as much as possible, I change my daily schedule. I try to say “yes” more than I say “no” and that is also harder than you’d imagine.
Do you ever think about how so much of what we do is sequential? Getting up in the mornings we go through a sequence of actions and almost certainly we do them in the exact same way every single morning, unless you have small kids or teenagers and then all bets are off there because #kids…
I bet you open the same tabs in the same order every morning, don’t you? Confession not required! 😁
So… I try to derail that train of habitual consistency for a month, to wake myself up and see everything with new eyes. And it’s fascinating, what happens.
I’m keeping a Daily Activity Journal as part of this January effort because doing that keeps me honest and diligent in maintaining this practice. It’s pretty simple. I just journal about the following things, loosely, every day:
My Daily Activity Journal:
-My early morning reading
-Good things
-Food and Cooking
-General Observations on life
-Music
-Stuff I did today
-Beauty
-Nature
-Tiny stories
-Thankfuls
These are placeholders, prompts, and so I may not write in every category every day but I will try, because “discipline” and “paying attention.” It’s all part of the whole.