The daily card, weeks 3 and 4

                       I started making cards on January 1 but got a late start in posting them, so I'm playing catch-up on the blog even though I'm up-to-date in real life. I'm a huge fan of this batch overall - at this point I felt like I was getting the hang of it and coming up with ideas I really liked. Lessons learned so far: I have found that I sometimes have great ideas during the workday but then less motivation to translate them into reality when I come home at night. So I'm glad I have the daily challenge to make sure that I actually use my ideas.  It's also a bit frustrating when the cards don't come out quite like I'd imagined them, since I'm still mastering techniques like "holding your hand steady while stamping on photos," but that's all part of the creative process, I suppose.

Love these cards, love this project, excited to share weeks 5 and 6 next week.

This is your reset position

In 2014, I became a huge Bar Method addict. “Reasons I love Bar Method” is a topic for another day complete with promotional video. But I go to class most weekdays and it has become a huge part of my daily routine, one that keeps me healthy and balanced and starting my mornings on a positive note.

During one of the exercises, you support your leg with your hand between reps, and the instructors will say “this is your reset position.” It seems to be part of the Bar Method phrasebook along with “you’re shaking so hard you look like you’re going to fall over.” (It's all about the shake.) and “Retuck, resqueeze.” (It's also all about the tucking and squeezing). 

Last spring, my organization held a huge event with almost 100 young party activists at a hotel on the beach in Sousse, Tunisia. (Tough gig, I know.) Like a lot of work events, it was intense and round-the-clock – lots of work, lots of socializing, lots of political debate. I found myself escaping to the beach to walk through the waves before breakfast or to watch the sunset after I'd closed the laptop for the evening. I tried to make it at least once a day.
   

Sitting on the beach one evening, after the sun had set, the phrase popped into my head – this is your reset position. And it was true. It was a literal and figurative breath of fresh air in the middle of long, crazy days. Work trips entail a huge, exciting, exhausting overlap of work and life and travel. In the midst of all that stuff piling up, I needed that time to myself - to come back to myself. It was like wiping the slate clean and starting fresh. Washing everything away. Refreshing the page. Starting back at zero.

This is your reset position.

Lots of things can be reset positions. Writing and reading and creating and running and going to Bar Method and walking on the beach and getting 10,000 steps and drinking wine. They are so necessary, especially for a textbook introvert like me. You need those pauses, rests, times to refresh, times to come back to yourself.
This is your reset position.

Why I'm Writing

Photo chosen because there's a degree of shamelessness involved any time you share your life online, right?

Hmm. I'm still figuring out what I want from writing in this space. And how what I am interested in writing intersects with what people are interested in reading. There’s something so awkward about trying to get strangers on the Internet interested in your life, isn’t there? (This is an interesting take). It's hard to imagine developing a huge following, and I'm not looking to turn this into a career. I do not plan on being a social media expert or a life coach.

Why am I writing, then?

Most of all, I am writing to push myself as a writer. I want to write more and better. These days, no one is assigning me to keep a weekly journal or to expound on my personal philosophies on life and literature, and I miss writing outside a professional setting. If I push more of my thoughts out of my personal journals and into the world, I'm hoping it will push me to think clearer, to write better, and to connect my own words with what could be valuable to someone else.

I am writing to work towards (if not hit) the 10,000 hour mark of mastery. 

I am writing to document, hopefully with some consistency. I have intermittently kept journals my entire life. I love both the process of emptying thoughts onto paper so I don't have to hold onto them so tight in my head, and having the record of how I saw the world at nine and sixteen and twenty. So I love the idea of having almost ten years of archives documenting your growing into adulthood.

I am writing in hopes that, in the process, I will find my voice, written and otherwise. I think finding your voice is one of the most important things you can do as a young adult. (Beyond growing in compassion and trying to save the world and all of that). 

I am writing because I want to practice condensing my thoughts into their most interesting kernel, omitting the whole lengthy backstory. 

I am blogging because as much as I like the idea of writing New Yorker-worthy essays, I perhaps have no imagination for fiction and no energy to research and write nonfiction, at least at the moment. Bits and pieces of my personal life, on the other hand, are right there for the inscribing. And what could be more interesting, to quote Dave Eggers, than the "many twists and turns of my own thrilling and complex mind"?

I am still trying to work out a cohesive subject matter, if such a thing exists in blogland. I will keep writing about my travels, and I hope that will push me to pay closer attention when I am traveling. I will post the occasional craft, and I hope that will push me to be more creative. But mostly, I plan to keep writing about this process of growing up, and to see where it all takes me.