JANUARY JOURNAL: DAY 26

I'm about to quit blogging every day. It has been a certain cure for not writing, to write every day in January. It has been hard and good. It has been nice not to have to decide each day whether I will write,  and this practice has convinced me that we make time for what we purpose to do.

I used to not have time to blog every day, and then magically, I've found time. I used to not have time to write a letter every day, and then magically, for the year of The Letter Project, I found time every single day.

I love Gretchen Rubin's books The Happiness Project and Happiness at Home. They both inspire and delight, and as you would guess, I copied down about a gazillion quotes from the two of them in my commonplace books.

Rubin shares lots of quotes in her books, so often I found myself copying down quotes of quotes, like this one in red:

Isn't that great?

We have to start somewhere, or else we will never do the things we want to do. Or maybe, like Goff said,  we have to stop somewhere, or else we will never do the things we want to do.

Don't worry that it's coming up on the end of January, for it's never too late to begin. (It's also never too late to stop.) You can set aside ten minutes, or twenty minutes, or even two minutes a day, to do something at which you want to improve.

Rubin also said this: One reason that challenge brings happiness is that it allows you to expand your self-definition. You become larger. Suddenly you can do yoga or make homemade beer or speak a decent amount of Spanish."

I have absolutely zero interest in learning yoga or making beer or speaking Spanish. But I know from experience that this daily blog challenge has expanded my definition of myself. I can arrange my life in such a way to make time for writing, even for decent writing on a lot of days, and I can come up with creative ideas and fresh words for the page. It's difficult every single time to sit with the blank page, but the more often I force myself to do it, the more collective experiences I have of conquering the blank page and the stronger my writing muscles feel.

Thursday may be a day to stop something. Or it may be a day to start something. Or, as is often the case, it may be a day to stop something in order to start something.