Tiny Fairy Garden (Aug '10)
Welcome, darlings, to Open Mic Friday! Guest posts will return next week with the fabulous Juanita Mantz. For today, let’s talk.
After an emotional week (and stormy weather here in the Bay Area), I’ve been looking forward to chatting with you about a topic I find calming and grounding: daily practices. Today’s question is simple:
Do you have daily practices that serve you well?
These can be work practices, personal ones, fitness, relationship, whatever. If there are any practices that have failed to launch (or land), feel free to tell us about those too.
As always, comments are threaded so you may reply to each other — which I encourage you to do! I’ll chime in sometime during the weekend, but don’t wait for me to get started.
Happy Friday, and go to it! Converse!
**An additional notice for writers and poets: One of my UCLA creative writing friends is starting a literary journal, and is seeking submissions for the inaugural issue. To apply, read her call. Why not give it a try? She won’t bite — and we need more women published and trying, anyway.**
satsumabug.com | Lisa Hsia 
Thanks, Lisa! You’re the best.
Looking forward to your work on this blog, too.
Thank you for the love, Xixi! 😀
I have a lot of habits and ideas of things. So there’s that. I would say these are things that I do (spontaneously on a regular basis, or at least 3-4 times a week 2-3 weeks out of a month ; )
I have taken up training for a 5k (I am a new, slow, slow asthmatic runner). So, I run three times a week for training. Daily exercise is something I WANT to attain.
Before I took up running (in Feb). I did a slow, reflective morning walk with tall cup of coffee before work (3-4 miles) 2-3 times week. I am looking forward to getting back to that more often. I much prefer that to running. During work I do a 15 min. walk during lunch.
Daily doings:
I listen to music.
I dance around my apartment (I also often take dance lessons–in areas of dance I will never, ever master, ever. I am currently learning bhangra dance.)
I sing loudly and definitely can be heard through the walls and into the hallway.
I check my emails.
I write or think about writing, or daydream about writing. But I never give up on writing as a driving force in my life.
I pray.
I drink coffee for enjoyment.
I watch Disney Channel TV (programming for 12 year olds is critical to my psyche. They dont have problems I can’t resolve and it’s a destresser).
I think those are the only things I truly do every day.
I start my morning with Disney Channel or Nick Jr! Sometimes I end my day with cartoons as well.
I have been reading more and since I’ve been car-less I’m loving walking my son to school.
I take online writing classes/workshops to get some writing done…without deadlines and accountability I would never write anything.
I check emails/facebook/twitter constantly and try to get some episodes of Glee / Tara/ True Blood here and there.
🙂
Helena, your daily doings sound good. 🙂 Yay for reading and walking more! The walking is good for your son too, I’m sure. I think a lot of my adult love of walking comes from walking to school for many years. 🙂
Willona, I love your list of daily doings! I hear you on “Daily exercise is something I WANT to attain.” I aim for six days a week and I’ve been counting even really simple things, like ten minutes of stretching at the end of the day, because I just want to build the habit of movement. Your reflective morning walk sounds like a beautiful practice. One of my least favorite things about where we live now is that there are great trails nearby, but there’s no nice, flat, meandery place I can walk to just from our driveway. My ideal daily walking habit would be what I had as an undergrad: the ability to leave my home in any direction and have a nice walk with lots of stuff to see.
I don’t have a TV, but I read children’s fiction regularly. It serves the same purpose for me as your Disney Channel watching. 🙂 And since I reread old favorites, there’s comfort in the familiarity too.
Hmmn… I have to admit that when I read the phrase “daily practices” I feel totally undisciplined! I like the phrase, but it just doesn’t feel like something I have. Yet, if I think of it more as “stuff I do regularly in my life” suddenly the world of my thought process comes to mind. Does that mean I’m a really low-key person?
I dream of the time when I can eat breakfast at my dining room table. I was able to do that for a few months before the table again became a repository for all the things that don’t have a place, but can’t be thrown away yet. So now that I have time again, I’m in the process of rectifying my storage situation by methodically going through all the ‘stuff’ in my living and dining room. My day begins better when I drink my coffee or tea and eat my breakfast while I read a newspaper at a table, and I eat better (nutritionally speaking) when I set the food out in my pretty, although mismatched, dishes. So that will become a daily practice again. I’ve been taking an hour or two for this (slow) process at the end of most days. I hope to replace this process with afternoon exercise time once it’s done.
If I feel like writing or have an idea, I work on that after breakfast, after I do a little blog maintenance. If I’m not in a groove with that, and if I need some calming time, I read or tend to watch TV. I’d rather have places to go and people to see, but in the absence of that I’m drawn to people-watch in some of the reality shows like “Celebrity Apprentice.” (I can’t watch the one with struggling people who really need the job. For me that’s a real downer, but the celebrities are working for charity, and working in the public eye is what they do for a living.)
I try to test what I know about human nature and personality types when I watch shows like that one and “Real Housewives of New York” (what an awful title!) and “Bethenny Ever After.” This actually helps my writing by keeping me in mind of how my characters have different, specific personality types, and histories based on how they perceive the world. I’ve actually seen two people on very different shows who made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, because the problems they were having with communication were chillingly similar to the problems my ex had with his Aspergers Disorder. That’s making me understand that the book I need to write about my experience and how it happened (but don’t really want to write), could be very important in helping people understand the importance of letting some things go, and how important it is to decide what it is that we really need from someone else, and whether we can realistically get that from the person in question. We can each get so stuck on our own points of view — what if we understood the possibility that there may be absolutely no way that our feelings will ever be understood by some people, and it’s not because they are cruel or crazy? Could we let go then? I know it sounds weird. That’s one of the reasons I should probably try to write the book, and believe it or not, some of my TV watching could help me do it.
Which brings me to the last thing I do almost daily: I try to focus at least a little bit, on letting a lot of things about relationships go. I need to keep exercising that muscle to keep it strong. It’s a rocky road, because I’m affected often by how other people feel and express themselves, but considering my own personality type, it’s amazing how much uncomfortable stuff I really have learned to just let go of!
I seem to have written an essay here, so I’ll give it a rest and get to reading how your other readers are answering today’s question!
Ré, I used to have tons of daily practices, but these days the question makes me feel undisciplined too — I don’t seem to have any! Your living/dining decluttering habit actually sounds very restorative (though I can see how it might be exhausting). I think there are studies about how cleaning our physical spaces can help us organize our thoughts too.
I’m struck by reading everyone’s responses that TV is in there. It’s not a value judgment at all, it’s just that I have never had a TV as an adult, so it simply doesn’t register on my daily routine. I forget how much of a role it plays in most people’s lives… probably the same role the internet plays in mine. ;b
Sounds like your daily inner work on relationships is important soul food, too — or maybe soul vitamins would be more like it. 😉
ahhh daily practices!!! my ever elusive goal! i’ve always admired those who are able to hold down a regular schedule. throughout college my best friend was always really good about sleeping on time, waking up early, going to the gym, attending classes, allotting daily study time, cooking meals, washing her face and flossing her teeth before bed… and i considered myself on a roll if i did 1 of those things. i always make big plans for establishing “routine” that always fall through (i’m slowly coming to accept i will forever tend toward the nocturnal!).
this may be TMI but i’ve always been horrible at flossing my teeth daily. the dentist and my parents harassed me constantly when i was growing up, and i’d keep it up in spurts that would inevitably fail. then last october after my first dentist appointment in like 2.5 years (i was procrastinating…:\) all of a sudden it clicked! and i’ve flossed EVERY DAY since!!! i don’t know what made the difference but i’m so proud of myself anyway 🙂
when my birthday rolled around last september, i decided to try doing a “sketch a day” for a year. i figured it’d be a fun way to map the year and get me to draw (and i’d have a fun full sketchbook by the end; my last sketchbook spans almost a decade and still isn’t full). knowing me you can already guess i didn’t even come close to keeping it up daily. but instead of giving up entirely i decided to just draw more often and not dwell on the gaps in between. so far i’ve produced a good handful of sporadic drawings. nothing to show for november through january, which i blame on india and the holidays, but still far more than i had before! i’ll scan a few in sometime to share 🙂
lastly, i started seeing a chiropractor last week after almost 3 months of internal pelvis/sacrum pain that started at the beginning of this year for no apparent reason. turns out my tendency to be super lopsided whether active or sitting/standing caused my right hip to get subtly “locked” into position, causing my left one to overcompensate by becoming hypermobile (right side has always been the stronger, sturdier, less flexible side). this irritated the nerves and caused swelling and continuous pain which was starting to affect my daily life. anyway long story short, i’ve now been assigned a set of “daily practices” that are not optional if i want the pain to go away (and if i don’t want years of lopsided development and bad posture to cause further problems). it’s just 12 stretches and a couple exercises (plus icing afterwards), but i’m diligently doing them daily out of desperation to HEAL. how’s that for motivating a daily practice? 😉
Tamara, I often think that everyone just has a different relationship with routine — and mine seems to change all the time. ;b At some points in my life I have been really happy to have a totally mapped-out daily schedule that barely varied from day to day, and at other times that’s been stifling and I’ve needed more freedom in my habits. But as long as what we’ve got works for us, it’s okay, right? 🙂
I totally hear you on the flossing. I never did it regularly until I’d been with Erik for… what, five years or so? All that time he would tell me how important it is, and I’d see him flossing all the time (he does it twice a day), and finally it just sank in and now I rarely go a day without it.
Your pelvic/sacrum pain sounds really awful. 😦 I hope your exercises relieve it!! My mom developed sciatica a year or two ago, and now she does exercises every morning to keep it at bay. I should really be stretching my body more (especially wrist, hands, shoulders, neck, and back)… before I develop any debilitating problems. 😐
This has been a really interesting question for me to think about (and I have LOVED everyone’s responses), because I used to be super into daily practices, and now I think they’ve all gone to seed. Even my morning pages don’t happen every day anymore. I could make you a nice-sized booklet of all the practices I’ve tried to implement without success: meditation, home yoga practice, evening reading, morning and evening quiet time, walking, winding down with Erik every night (though we’re still holding the fort okay on that one), cooking dried beans, gardening…
Sometimes I think it’s totally okay and probably appropriate that I can only manage most things on a weekly and not daily basis. After all, life is complicated, creativity is nonlinear, and I’m generally happy with what I’m doing. So it’s okay! But then I see someone else’s dedicated practice, or I read some study about the importance of just touching your projects every day (5 minutes of daily walking is better than 2 hours on the weekends, etc), and then I wonder if I’m dramatically slowing my progress by not writing/drawing/painting/walking/meditating on a daily basis. But I suppose this is the same as everything else: I just need to go slowly, not bite off more than I can chew, listen to my body, and figure out what’s best for me.
I love your last sentence here! I know it rings true for me. Isn’t it strange how much all these studies make us question ourselves and how we live, yet something about them doesn’t seem to honor the realities of our individual lives and how much (and what kinds of) emotional support we need every day to remain ‘different’. To really be successful at making all these healthy changes that we are ‘supposed to’ we seem to have to be someone else, someone with different inherent characteristics and capabilities, and with different needs for entertainment and self comfort.
We each are simply who we are. Very, very individual. So what you said about going slowly, and getting to know yourself — that’s what we all need. It’s the only way to go. The responses you got here, as well as your own point of view, truly support that.
Thank you, Ré. I’ve been reading some interesting books lately too, about women’s bodies and women’s creativity, and they all celebrate individuality (and learning to understand ourselves), too!
I pray.
I love.
I eat.
I find and create the JOY within.
I post motivational words on GB, or quip about an observation that left an indelible mark on me.
I write.
I drink coffee.
I kiss and tell my husband and kids that I love them…again…and again…I didn’t hear those words much as a child (making up for “lost” time?).
I crochet orders for my business.
I workout – 3-5x a week. It’s MY Prozac. (That includes jumping rope, cycling, spinning, teaching fitness, jogging, all while listening to some bangin beats!)
I dance…like no one’s watching! Seriously.
Wow, Ms. Empress! When I read your list I almost feel undisciplined again! But I can tell that you have what you need in your life, and I know that fuels you to get so much done. Here’s to you and all your wonderful energy!
Sounds like a good life to me! 🙂 I need to get more dancing into my daily routine! Someone said we should count every day lost on which we have not danced… I forget that sometimes. And singing!
Lady Sparks! Guess what? While reading ur initial response to the question, I “felt” that it was you, before I even saw your name at the bottom! How’s that for alignment? “Almost” is a key word. We’re actually more disciplined than we think, even when we fall out of “routine”. They’re different – routine and discipline. I’m working at being more consistent, but it seems that I’m consistent enough in the truly important things, as you are. Practice (daily or not) makes perfect!