Three new Creative Contemplations for the new year

to help you care for yourself and become more attentive to the world around you

Good morning!

We’re enjoying a perfectly wintery day here, and it’s scarf-over-my-turtleneck and leggings-under-jeans cold. While the new year started last week, this is the day the kids return to school and the husband returns to teaching, so it feels like the first day back into the rhythm of “regular life,” if there’s such a thing.

This is the second installment of 31 Days of Creative Contemplations, a series in which I offer creativity and mindfulness prompts for each day in January. I’m batching them here instead of sending them daily so that my newsletter subscribers don’t get annoyed with the sudden influx of mail. Please take or leave these as gifts and encouragements, not must-do activities to add to your new years resolutions.

Monday, January 5: Create a one-minute ritual for each morning.

Find a song lyric, poem, prayer, mantra, quote, scripture—something to read first thing each morning that inspire or comforts you.

For me this ritual is replacing my impulse to reach for my phone first thing, a pattern which is not good for my brain. You probably don’t need me to tell you there is ample evidence that starting your day with your device increases stress and dopamine addiction and decreases concentration. In those precious initial moments of wiring your thinking for the day, to turn instead to your sticky note or cue card or random scrap envelop you’ve jotted your phrase.

I just listened to a podcast about the importance of ritual from Béa Victoria Albina where she talks about how rituals are necessary for our nervous system, to signal a sense of safety to our bodies, to take time to be present.

If you’re a perfectionist like me, you’ll be looking for the perfect phrase to bring you into this new year. My brain here’s this assignment and thinks: find something that’s deep and fresh, not too basic or cheesy or earnest. Forget all those things. Pick something that works for today. Change it later if you find something you like better. Here’s mine for now, a Rumi quote that my spiritual director sent to me, scrawled on a piece of paper left over from making dioramas with the kids.

Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.

Don’t try to see through the distances.

That’s not for human beings. Move within,

but don’t move the way fear makes you move.

Rumi

Tuesday, January 6: Play with your food.

Take one of your meals and be playful with how you plate it. Put raisins on your oatmeal in the shape of a heart, put the peas around your mashed potatoes in a circle, see how high you can pile the chips on your plate. This prompt creates mindfulness around your eating and allows you a small opportunity to be creative with something ephemeral. I think there is value in creative play that we know won’t last, in experimenting with things that are designed to be destroyed, consumed or pulled away by the tide.

Wednesday, January 7: Walk.

I promised at the beginning that these prompts would take 3-5 minutes of your day, so take whatever time you can to do this, but please do it disconnected—no headphones, Bluetooth, cellphone or company outside the birds and the neighbourhood cat that may stop for belly rubs. Leave space around your ears for your thoughts to think.

If the ample accounts of artists and inventors who took their daily constitution isn’t enough evidence, here’s a study from Stanford that says walking improves creativity.

Young deer spotted on a fall walk

Okay, more to come on Thursday. Thanks for nurturing creativity in a world that constantly drains you. I truly believe that when you make time for creativity and contemplation, you cultivate deeper compassion and attentiveness in yourself and become a gift for others. (Sorry for the alliteration.)