“We become what we repeatedly do.” -Sean Covey
For the One Little Word 2019 March prompt I completed the following each day:
- Write down at bedtime three things that happened during the day
- Snap a “from where I stand” photo
- Share it on Instagram the next morning
This is not what I thought in first place once I found out about the 31-day challenge prompt. I really wanted to do a daily doodle (in paper not iPad) about items that represent my life right now but we just adopted a new puppy and I need to see how life and routines change. Doodling is a more elaborated and time consuming practice, especially since I am not an artist and I have not developed a drawing basic skill yet. I would likely have failed a challenge like that (and I suck at daily challenges in general) although I am planning to dive into it later this year.
Reason why– Documenting life is already part of me (although not on a daily regular basis). I chose the daily documentation challenge because most times there are details about everyday life that get lost when I only document weekly or monthly, so achieving a daily practice has always been a dream for me.
Ways this prompt/challenge connected me with my word:
- Memory keeping is something I am familiar with and it is very rewarding; this challenge would give me the opportunity to cultivate it as a daily habit, which is something I have not been able to achieve before.
- Writing and capturing important (and even random) facts about my everyday will help me to cultivate awareness of real life, of the mundane.
- This practice enriched and cultivated my memory-keeping hobby through telling more stories, especially those that often end up forgotten.
- Sharing my daily notes and photo on Instagram let me cultivate relationships and connections with people online and it will made me accountable to complete it.
Through March I cultivated a habit, a hobby, the awareness of real life and the connections with friends and people online, all through the daily practice of memory keeping.
I could have just chosen to write the three things or the daily photo, but deciding to do both plus sharing, described who I am most time: someone who likes to complicate things and then feel guilty about failure. I wanted to embrace that part of me and at the same time I wanted to challenge myself to do different. To be honest, the “daily” was what made the idea kind of hard to me. And since this was, indeed, a daily challenge, I really loved seeing how far I went.
You can read about my other prompts here: Jan Feb
One Little Word is a year long project started by the awesome Ali Edwards in 2006 where she chose a word to focus on, meditate, and reflect on throughout the year.
