Rolling with one change a month…introduction…
On what I thought would be the last day of vacation earlier this year, I was thinking about how I could preserve some of the clarity of mind I had gained by slowing down during the break. So on the last morning of the last day, I took a piece of paper to the beach, wrote the name of each month in a column with a dash next to it and a blank space after the dash. I wanted to do this on paper, rather than an iPad or iPhone, as it reminds me of a similar exercise that I used to do, under different circumstances, and hadn’t done in some time, to get ideas of my head and clear my mind. I knew from past experience that once I got back to the work routine at home, things would start to race again and the time to sit back, reflect, and hopefully grow would become tougher and tougher to harness.
The list I was about to write was inspired by two sources. The first was the SeaChange Program I had read about at the ZenHabits blog, written by Leo Babauta. The second was Dr. Michael Finkelstein’s book, 77 Questions for Skillful Living. The SeaChange program looked interesting to me and I considered signing up for it. When I looked at the curriculum, it looked pretty relevant, however not quite relevant enough to what I was hoping to accomplish. I then thought about how the 77 Questions for Skillful Living would be a great menu to choose from to customize my own plan to make one change a month for each month of 2014. Another idea that I adopted from the SeaChange Program was that one change a month was the right frequency and provided enough flexibility to help make this a successful experiement for me.
I also decided for myself that one change a month means that I have the entire month to initiate and implement the change. This seems to be the last missing piece of the puzzle for me. Because the expectaions I put on myself are almost always very rigid, it was helpful to relax those expectations by giving myself the entire month to make the change. This meant two things to me -
1 — If I didn’t start the day exactly on Day 1 of the month, that was OK, because I could get started any time during the month.
2 — If I started the change, then stopped, that was OK too, because I had the entire month to make the change a lasting one.
(These two guidelines may be part of the SeaChange program as well, I haven’t investigated it thoroughly enough to know one way or the other.)
So this was the plan I wrote out while on the beach that day. As I’ve written before, that didn’t turn out to be the last day of the trip, only the last day of week 1, since we were delayed in returning home for another week. It was during week 2 of the vacation when I started to write this blog.
Despite the delays, the list made it home with me. I still have it. It’s one of the few pieces of physical paper I actually keep, since I usually scan everything else, in an effort to have a paperless office. I think having the same piece of paper is a strong physical reminder of the state of mind I was in when I took this piece of paper to the beach and started writing. It’s a good reminder for me of the commitment I made then and continue to roll with now.
I’m planning to write about each change in separate blog posts, although I recognize this is starting to impose a structure on this blog that I’m trying to resist. For now, here are the changes for the first three months of the year -
January — Begin daily writing habit and unplug on Sundays (daily writing to me is part of Question 41 and unplug to me is part of Question 22 of the 77 Questions)
(OK, I know this is two! I resisted the urge to put more than one change on the schedule for each month, however really felt like I needed these two to start the year…)
February — Write down three things I’m thankful for at the end of each day
March — Start writing in the 5 Minute Journal
April — Begin helping at a community garden (Question 18 of the 77 Questions)