Prompt: Design – 02 | What have you been doing recently to design a life you love?
I spend a lot of time thinking about what matters to me and designing the life I want for myself. I pick a word of the year, make daily, weekly, monthly goals for myself so that I can continually work towards building the life I want. This time of year is always when I take a moment to look back and reflect on the year I’ve had. On what worked and what didn’t work as well. I make a point to write down all the things that happened so that I can see how much happens in one year and how much I’ve already done. It’s important for me to get to see it because it’s easy for me to write off all the positive efforts I put into areas of my life and only notice where I am still falling short.
After I bid farewell to the last year, I spend a lot of time dreaming, wishing, designing the life I want for the following year. At this moment, I am spending my time thinking about what I want 2020 to look like. I use my One Little Word to have the overarching goal for the year. Next year, my word will be: WILD. It’s a reminder to go out into the wild more often. To hike, to camp, to be near the water. To learn, grow, take risks. I then choose my core desired feelings. Four or five words that reflect how I want to feel throughout 2020. When opportunities come up, I think about how they will make me feel and see if it’s one of those five. If so, I say yes. If not, I turn it down. This helps me spend more time feeling the way I want to feel.
Once I have those down, I then design projects for myself so I can push and encourage myself. So I can in fact live my word and my feelings every single day. I have projects around drawing (like @karenikareads), reading, telling stories, going on hikes, movement, journaling and reflection, etc. This helps me take time each week to remember how I am spending my moments and see if I can help align them to the way I want to live.
I spend a lot of time designing the life I want. I still manage to struggle all the time but I know that being intentional helps me get closer to the life I want then ever.
This year I am planning to do something different than last year. Around last September, I stopped taking a lot of daily photos which then meant I also stopped scrapbooking. I have several of the Story Kit’s piled up. So I decided to switch gears a bit and see if I can use Ali’s prompts to tell my stories. I might (or might not) also turn them into scrapbook pages. In the meantime, I will just enjoy telling my stories.
Stories from 2020 is a year-long project for 2019. You can read more about my projects for 2020 here. The prompts are from Ali’s Story Kits unless mentioned otherwise. I have started an instagram account for these, we’ll see if I keep it up.
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