Volume 2, Issue 25: Some Healthy Phrases for Effective Communication
Hi friends! For the month of November, I worked on cultivating three habits: writing daily, stretching daily, and writing snail mail daily. I stretched all but 4 days, I wrote snail mail all but 3 days, and to my utter surprise, I wrote all but 2 days. I reflected on this at the end of the month and decided that the daily snail mail wasn’t sparking joy. I still love sending mail, but I wasn’t inspired when I was forcing myself to do it every day so that is not a habit I will continue to cultivate. I find that I start to miss it when I don’t stretch daily and it *gasp* actually makes me feel good, so I’ll be continuing that in December. Shockingly, I also found that I missed writing on the days that I didn’t do it, so I’ll be continuing that in December as well.
I think focusing on cultivating 3 habits per month is a good number for me, so for my third daily habit, I need to clean something. It could just mean dusting a shelf or putting something where it belongs. Normal maintenance (taking out recycling, putting away laundry, etc.) does not count. I am a maximalist on the best of days and the situation in our apartment is getting dire. Multiple books are coming into the apartment every week. We have no more room for non-consumable items. Believe me, we try to use as many mugs per day as possible and also if one more mug comes into our home I might burst into tears. It’s getting to the point where there isn’t enough room to think. So, I’m going to try to take care of it little by little and hopefully turn that into a habit. We’ll see how it goes!
Speaking of habits, I’m reading Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear at the suggestion of my therapist. I have A Lot of Thoughts™ about it but I’m not done with the book yet so I’ll hold those until I am finished. I will say that I am getting enough out of it that I will likely read through the whole thing.
Gratuitous photo of the cranberry pound cake I made for last Thursday: