I know from experience that if I want to create a habit, I have to do it every day. That’s what I did when I decided I needed to maintain my flexibility and prevent lower back pain. I started doing a daily 15 minute exercise routine. It took quite a few weeks to make it a daily routine, but now it’s cemented in. So, while spending 10 days in Valencia, Spain, with my husband who had just lost both his parents, I decided that I wanted to write short posts on Facebook every day. The world was a tormented place for many people and I felt like sharing some positive thoughts with this limited community of friends from all over the globe. But what was I going to write about?
It was Monday when I started and without much thought to it, I wrote Monday…Magic. I wrote about the magical feeling I get when I think about happy moments with my family and friends. Then, on Tuesday, I thought: well, I should write a title that starts with T like Tuesday. And so it went. Every day of the week. This made it a bit more challenging to find the topic for the post. And I do like challenges. I kept writing every day and on the fifth or sixth day, I thought about quitting. Whaaaat, you say? Yes, I thought about quitting. But I didn’t. And do you know why?
One of my very best friends sent me a text on my phone -on the day when I was going to quit- telling me how much she loved the posts I’d been sharing on Facebook lately. Well, darn it, that made it impossible to quit now. So I got back on my “horse” and continued to post. My husband smiled at me and we laughed as I wrote the daily posts. He said that he also enjoyed reading them. These positive encouragements gave me delight and kept me going. Since then I don’t post every day, but I write when I have a good idea.
All this writing is definitely helping me to improve my writing but it’s also done something else that I’m pretty fond of: reflecting on things. I have been reflecting on my family’s past and on life in general. And I happen to think that it’s important to take the time to do this. Life is short and it will be more enjoyable if we take some time to meditate on the meaning of things. Agree?
