30 Days of Life: Day 1

Today I start a little writing experiment...30 days of blogging about the stuff of life. I'll write about things like faith, family, writing, the weather (Oi! Maybe you shouldn't get me started about the weather here lately!) motherhood, identity, and anything else that comes to mind, or emerges as a part of life over the next month. I'll write about whatever leaves the biggest impression on me on any given day, or at least in the moment that I'm actually writing because my days are usually full of so many things that it would be hard to summarize my thoughts about an entire day into a mere 1,000 words or less. 

I hope you'll join me. There is not pressure to buy anything, to get up earlier than normal, to try to set goals, to become more organized...I've realized I'm not that kind of writer, at least not at the moment. I just need to find a new rhythm, a new way of living that includes more writing and so this is where I'm starting...by writing about daily life and inviting you into it if you so wish to join me. 

May 16th

It’s so like me to start a blog post like this on a random Thursday in the middle of May, but then again such is my life—a little all over the place and seemingly random at times.

I had intended to start this at the beginning of May, and then suddenly it was Mother’s Day and now here we are smack dab in the middle of May, and so rather than wait until June first, or a seemingly proper Sunday or Monday (which both seem like good days to start something new, don’t you agree?), I decided I would just start here. Right where I am.

Because honestly, is there ever any better place to start?

Here’s the thing, I haven’t started, or finished, a lot of things in my life lately because it didn’t seem like the right time, or like I had enough time, or like everything was aligned in such a way that I would actually be able to finish the task(s) properly. 

(As a side note, I’ve read that this is a symptom of perfectionism, which always makes me laugh because if you observed my life for any amount of time you’d see that things are far from perfect. But, I get what the ‘experts’ are saying and so I’m learning to just start…to jump in… into the messy middle…to avert any perfectionist tendencies that don’t really suit my life anyway).

Why am I doing this? Writing about life, just plain life, for 30 days?

Well, because I haven’t blogged consistently for quite some time, and I thought this experiment in writing about daily life might help me to re-establish a new rhythm. I thought it might help me to counteract the reasons I haven’t blogged consistently for quite some time—reasons like:

1.) The blogging and social media world have changed so much in such a short period of time that I haven’t known how to respond to it all.

Ten years ago blogs were more often about daily life and that was ok, even the norm. 

However, in the last few years they have become so much more—they’ve become platforms (to use a publishing term), they’ve become soap boxes, ways to make money, ways to promote people, places and things. 

It seems that the media powers that be (perhaps the readers) have demanded that blogs be more service oriented, meaning they should be meet a need for the reader either in a tangible way (by offering a product) or an emotional way (by offering encouragement or a solution), and while I think that can be a very good thing, I personally don't have a product or a solution to offer you at the moment...just my life...that's all. 

So, from a place of confusion and overwhelm of not knowing what my message or my “product” is (friends, I’m not a product peddler…I’m just not), or even what my proper niche actually is…I pulled back rather than jump in. I’ve been quiet, and not blogging, but I've missed this format as a simple form of sharing life and so I decided that since I have the freedom to actually say whatever I want here, I'll just talk about life again...for now. 

2.) Life has felt challenging in the most mundane ways for quite some time and I didn’t really want to talk about it. Because I’m a transparent person I would have talked about it, but I didn't want to bore you with the details, or, if I’m honest, I didn’t want to bring you down with my questions, struggles and honest accounts about how some of the pieces of life haven’t made sense—

I also had a couple of people private message me in the last couple of  years and tell me I shouldn’t talk about all of the “negative” stuff in my life so much. Ugh. I wasn’t sure what to make of that, or how to feel about it, and so it simply became another source of silencing my voice for some time…

I’ve kept a list of things I deemed good blog topics along the way—things like finding hope on hard days, how running is my natural antidepressant and how finally having all three of my kids in school hasn’t suddenly opened up as much free time as I thought it would.

I’ve been reading great books about identity, faith, spiritual healing and motherhood and I’ve wanted to share them all with you, but I lost my rhythm and my blogging way and so it’s all just jotted down in pen in my bazillion journals, and on post it notes, and index cards, and scraps of paper in the backseat of my car.

I’ve started posts dozens of times, but when you haven’t talked to someone in a while—you, my friends and scattered audience—I haven't been sure where to start. 

The weather? A good book I’ve been reading? Some thoughts I had during my prayer time this morning?

So, I figured I’d start by just re-inviting you into my  daily life. A little bit of this, and a little bit of that, and in the process I figured I’d see what feels like it sticks and where inspiration rises  in my spirit.

I may not get around to posting every day, but I will write a little something each day and when I do post (most days), you’ll see my posts marked by the date(s) on which the thoughts were written—kind of like a diary, or journal.  So, for example, if I don’t post on 5/21 and 5/22, I’ll put something up on 5/23 that has all three dates within the same post with a few thoughts from that day. 

Make sense?!

I'll leave you with one more thought, a quote I came across recently from a book called Everyone Has a Story (I haven't read it, but would like to). In the book Savi Shawrma, the author, says this, 

“...everyone has a story. It might or might not be a love story. It could be a story of dreams, friendship, hope, survival or even death. And every story is worth telling. But more than that, it’s worth living.” 

On that note, here we go...a little writing about living...we'll see where it goes (: