Category: Write for You Blog

by Nancy Casey

Today’s writing will be done in two parts, so as you limber up your writing fingers and organize your writing materials, be sure you have at least two sheets of paper handy.

The first part is a list.  Turn your attention to your surroundings.  Look around, listen, sniff. Make a list of 10 or more things that are in your surroundings.

While you are doing that, let that back of your mind meditate on what it means to do something right.

First off, you are the only one who truly knows why you do what you do, so you are the only qualified judge of how well you do them.

Sometimes, the very fact that you did something at all is evidence that you have done something right.  You made an effort.  You had a certain intention.  You did what you did.

When we “do something right,” our life gets a little easier, a little smoother, a little better.  Often that means we don’t even notice what we did and why it was a good thing for us.  We do things like that all the time.

There are a zillion things we do right every day out of habit.  We do them automatically, without thinking and without giving ourselves credit.  Every time you go out the door with matching shoes on, you make your day easier than it would have been otherwise!  What habits do you have that keep your day running smooth?

In areas where we wish our lives were different, we often mistakenly judge ourselves as doing things “wrong.”  But that overlooks our understanding of the changes we’d like to see and the efforts we have made so far to bring them about. 

As you record your list of 10 or more objects, play around in your recent memories and recall some of the things that you’ve done recently that are just right for you.

To fill the second page, choose one of the objects that you have listed.  Describe it a little bit and then explain how it represents something that you are doing right.

Remember that there is a world of difference between “doing something right” and “being perfect,” especially if your idea of “perfect” is coming from somebody else’s standards.  Imagine, for instance that over there on the table is a bowl with a spoon and the dried remnants of yesterday’s breakfast in it.  That could be proof of your efforts to have good nutrition every day.  Or evidence of your delight in having found your favorite spoon last week when you cleaned out everything under the couch.

In other words, every object in your surroundings is proof that you have done something right. 

After you have written about one object, choose another, and keep going.  You will run out of paper or you will run out of time, but you will never run out of memories of things that you have done right.

When you have finished, put the date and title on both of your pages.  Here is an example of what your writing could look like.

 

Nancy Casey teaches writing classes at the Recovery Center on Thursdays.  Check the calendar for classes and times, or just drop in.  All are welcome.  She coordinates Recovery Radio, which airs on KRFP 90.3 FM in Moscow, Thursdays at 1:05 PM. Recovery Radio needs on-air and off-air volunteers.  Call the Recovery Center  208-883-1045 or email latahrecoverycenter@gmail.com for more information.

by Nancy Casey

Time flies.  Or does it?

We’re settling in to the heart of summer here in Latah County.  The world was vibrant green all around us a week ago.  Now that greenery is beginning to look brown and crusty at the edges.  It’s probably not going to rain much between now and September. 

These days, people who love hot weather are joyous.  People who wilt in the heat are, well,  wilting.  The last of the dusk fades from the sky just a few hours before the dawn twilight starts to creep in.  This week, with the moon big and bright, it will hardly seem to get dark at all.

When was the last time you flashed on a memory of the past winter, and what was that memory?

Did you recall the unrelenting cold and all the routines you had to perform to stay warm?  The snow buried us repeatedly, remember?  How did you navigate through it?  Did you play in it?

What clothes and shoes did you wear the most last winter?  How is the pile of stuff that’s by the door now different from the pile you had there six months ago? 

What did you worry about last winter?

What was your social life like during the winter?  Where did you see your friends?  What kinds of things did you do?  What did you talk about?

What did you do last winter that was fun?  What made you laugh?

Winter.  It was dark a lot of the time.

Was it a long time ago? Or was it just yesterday?

Begin daydreaming about your recollections of winter as you gather up your writing materials and limber up your hands and arms.  Before you begin to write, do a few slow neck rolls in either direction and invite the memories to flow in. Does your body feel the same as it did then?

If you write down the answers to all of these questions, what you will have is a whole bunch of information.  Information can be interesting, but stories are better.

Write down a story from last winter.  Something you did, maybe.  Or something you saw happen.  Something that happened to you.  It can be any kind of story. No doubt you have lots of them.  Just tell one.

Write your story using only one side of the page and leave a lot of empty space on the other.

When you have finished the story, go back to all those questions I asked at the beginning.  Think up bits and chunks of information that you could add to your story.  Write the new words or sentences in the extra space alongside the story and draw lines to the places in the story they should go.  Squeeze in as much as you can.  It might get kind of messy.  Use circles and arrows, or even different colors, so that you can follow your thinking when you look at it again.

Recopy it.  Tell the whole big story with all the information.  Change it around however you want.  Be sure to give it a title and put the date on it when you are finished.  There are a zillion different things a person could write.  Here is an example.

 

Nancy Casey teaches writing classes at the Recovery Center on Thursdays.  Check the calendar for classes and times, or just drop in.  All are welcome.  She coordinates Recovery Radio, which airs on KRFP 90.3 FM in Moscow, Thursdays at 1:05 PM. Recovery Radio needs on-air and off-air volunteers.  Call the Recovery Center  208-883-1045 or email latahrecoverycenter@gmail.com for more information.

 

 

by Nancy Casey

Today you will be writing about something that is large in your life. It can be an idea, an event or a person. Maybe it’s a pet, a place, or a hobby.
How do you tell if something is large in your life?
Things that are large in your life often carry an emotional charge. Has something made you feel angry or upset lately? What gets you excited? What is deeply satisfying to you? What is making you feel the way you feel right now?
The large things in our lives take up our time. What do you spend your time doing, thinking about, watching or listening to? Who talks to you? Who needs you? Who ignores you? Who and what do you take the time to avoid?
Is there something that you wish other people understood? Is there something you wish you understood?
When you get to thinking about it, there are probably a zillion things that are large in your life. One thing that they will all have in common is that it’s hard to decide where to start when you are going to write about it.
After you have decided what to write about, don’t think about where to start, just write down some information. Start anywhere. Anywhere, that is, except the beginning. Plop yourself into the middle of this large thing in your life and write down one brief thing about it. If the first thing you write turns out not to be brief, that’s fine.
Once you’ve written something, start a new line and write the words, “And another thing…” Now write down some more information about this large thing in your life. When that’s done, skip to a new line, write “And another thing…” and describe a different detail from this whole big thing you are trying to write about.
Keep doing that. Don’t skip the actual writing of the words, “And another thing” because that’s the interval when your mind relaxes and lets an interesting idea bubble up. Don’t worry about the order in which things come out. If everything is all scrambled up, it doesn’t really matter. You can always put things in the right order later if you felt like it.
At the end of your writing, give the page a title and be sure to put the date on it. Here’s an example of the kind of thing you might write.
Repeat this exercise a few times throughout the week. You can choose to return to the same topic over and over again and probably surprise yourself by how much there is to say. That’s because the things that are large in our lives are complex and touch many aspects of our lives that are important to us.
When you repeat the exercise, you could also choose to write about a different topic each time. At any moment, each one of us has many different things that are large in our lives. If you write about several of them, you might begin to see how they are connected. Or maybe you’ll discover that they are at odds with each other.
Perhaps you will discover another thing altogether. Such a thing would probably turn out to be large.

Nancy Casey teaches writing classes at the Recovery Center on Thursdays. Check the calendar for classes and times. All are welcome. She coordinates Recovery Radio, which airs on KRFP 90.3 FM in Moscow Thursdays at 1:05 PM. Recovery Radio needs on-air and off-air volunteers. Call the Recovery Center 208-883-1045 or email latahrecoverycenter@gmail.com for more information.

 

by Nancy Casey

If you have been following this blog since it began the first week in January, and if you have been making the pages that the blog suggests, you have amassed a sizeable pile of work. Now that a half a year has gone by, it’s a good time to take a look at all of it and think about what you have been doing.

Settle in and read through your pages. Take a closer look at what you have done.  Note the different kinds of pages you have made.  Some are lists, some are paragraphs, some have illustrations.  Do you like the looks of some better than others? Do you remember writing them all?

If you began in January, it was wintertime.  Now it is summer.  Do you find your writing reflects the change of season?  Even if you haven’t written specifically about the weather, does reading what you wrote six months ago make you recall the different season?  What else does your writing make you remember?

Check to see that all of the pages have titles.  If any are missing, add them in.  What makes a good title? Consider making a Table of Contents that has the list of all the titles.  You can then read it like it is a poem.

Recall that the goal of a writing practice is to bring the act of writing regularly into your life and accept whatever improvements that brings to you.  You can’t know ahead of time what those improvements will be.  Maybe your spelling or grammar will get better.  Maybe writing will help you think more clearly.  The moments of focus that writing requires can be a benefit.  Perhaps your writing practice will make it easier to write other things.  Perhaps you will take great pleasure in the written record you have produced.  What do you think you have gotten out of your writing practice so far?

Have you been writing “about” something?  How is that going?  Sometimes we choose a topic and decide to write about that.  Other times, the topic pops up in the writing itself.  Most of the time, it’s probably a combination of both.  Occasionally you can notice that a piece of writing causes you to recall a whole host of details that weren’t written down.  What would be a good title for this sheaf of pages?

After you have studied your work for a while and noticed as many things as you can about it, write yourself a pep talk for the coming months of your writing practice.  It will be a pep talk in two parts.  Write it as though you are talking to yourself.

1.      Describe everything that you like about the work that you have done.  Don’t say a single negative thing about it.

2.      Based on what you wrote in the first part, make suggestions to yourself about what to do more of.  Don’t suggest anything because you think it will be “good for you.”  Only suggest things that you know that you will like and remind yourself why you will like them.

 

Here is an example of what you might write for a pep talk.  Make sure you have put the date on it.  Don’t forget to give it a title.

 

The season has shifted to summer, and in another six months it will be winter.  Each day is an opportunity to work a little bit on your writing practice.  If you do, you won’t be sorry.

 

 

 

 

Nancy Casey teaches writing classes at the Recovery Center on Thursdays.  Check the calendar for classes and times.  All are welcome.  She coordinates Recovery Radio, which airs on KRFP 90.3 FM in Moscow Thursdays at 1:05 PM. Recovery Radio needs on-air and off-air volunteers.  Call the Recovery Center  208-883-1045 or email latahrecoverycenter@gmail.com for more information.

 

 

by Nancy Casey

Write a sentence.  Any sentence at all.  Ten words or so. A sentence from your life, your week or your imagination.  Maybe you’d prefer to pluck a sentence from something you wrote earlier. Or something that you heard, or read, or just plain made up.  The only requirement is that the sentence is interesting to you somehow.  Write it anywhere on the page.

Draw a box around your sentence.

Pick out an interesting word or little group of words from your sentence.  Draw a box around that.

Here’s the tricky part.  You must draw a line that leads from the little box around your word all the way out into somewhere in the big blank space on the paper. As soon as you start drawing that line, though, it is going to bump into the edge of the bigger box that you drew around the whole sentence.  Don’t bump that line, hop over it.  To do that, you must draw your line like a little bridge.  Make it into a little underpass.  Or an overpass.

This might make more sense if you look at an example.  Think of it as though the word in the little box is escaping from the sentence in the big box.

For the next step, you will write a sentence that uses the “escaped word” somewhere in the big white space on the page.  Draw a box (or a circle) around the new sentence.  Think about it and find a word or phrase that wants to escape from the new sentence.  Draw a box (or some kind of shape) around that. Then draw the line (or road) that leads it out of the box.  But don’t forget to make a little bump, some kind of a bridge that hops over the edge of the bigger box.

And then just keep on going.  You don’t have to do everything in perfect order.  Sometimes two different words will want to escape from the box by two different routes.  All you have to do is keep pulling words out of the sentences in the big boxes and use them to write new sentences for new boxes

It won’t be long before you have filled up the whole page.

 Don’t forget to mark the date and give your page a title. 

Nancy Casey teaches writing classes at the Recovery Center on Thursdays.  Check the calendar for classes and times.  All are welcome.  She coordinates Recovery Radio, which airs on KRFP 90.3 FM in Moscow Thursdays at 1:05 PM. Recovery Radio needs on-air and off-air volunteers.  Call the Recovery Center  208-883-1045 or email latahrecoverycenter@gmail.com for more information.

 

 

by Nancy Casey

Make a list of everything that you want.  Make you list as long as you can.  Go for quantity, not quality.  Leave a little bit of space between each thing you write down.

Don’t skimp.  You don’t have to figure out how to get the things on your list.  They don’t even have to be possible.  You only have to want them.  For at least as long as it takes to write them down.

Do you want to be taller, smaller, healthier, more relaxed, or less allergic to pine pollen? Do you want to be able to dance the rhumba, use Excel, walk to a mountaintop, or fly?  Do you want breakfast, a skateboard, new shoes or grandchildren? What do you want to change?  What do you want to stay the same?

After each item on your list, write the word “because.”  Then explain why you want what you want.  You don’t need a “good” reason, just a reason.  Nobody needs to read this except you.

We get a lot of messages telling us we want the wrong things.  We’re not supposed to want things that are bad for our health or that help destroy the planet.  We’re warned to be “realistic” about our wants, lest we end up disappointed, or worse.  And of course we’re not supposed to want things that have a negative effect on other people.

These messages are wrong.  We want what we want.  The only thing that’s truly silly to want is to want to want something you don’t want.

Our wants come from our deepest self, not from our logical mind.  By the time they do arrive in our logical mind and we turn them into language, they are already pretty scrambled.  If we reject those scrambled ideas out of hand, those wants just keep rumbling beneath the surface like bad digestion, trying to create opportunities to snag our attention.

By paying attention to what we want, we understand who we are.  Our wants and desires are like a navigation system.  We lean in their direction the way a plant leans towards the light. 

A thousand scrambled and contradictory wants will make our actions scrambled and contradictory.  But the want-generator inside our self doesn’t care, it just wants.  When we get what we want, it wants something else.  When we don’t get what we want, it either forgets or turns up the juice and wants it even more.

In other words, we can’t control our wants, we can only try to make sense of them.  The wants come from our deep self.  The sense comes from our logical minds.  The self doesn’t obey orders to want or not-want, but it does notice what the logical mind concludes. The self also strives for harmony, so when the logical mind notices contradictions or impossibilities, the self takes note, even when it pretends not to.

That’s where the list comes in.  Go ahead, let your self want its heart out.  Cut loose and have a veritable want-a-thon.  Be serious.  Be unrealistic.  Be ridiculous.  Make the list every day for a week.  “Today I want…, because…” Write that sentence over and over and enjoy what comes up.  All those wants are in there, and the simple act of writing them down can help you get better acquainted with the true you that’s inside of you.

You won’t end up wanting fewer things, or “better” things, but you will achieve more and more clarity about which wants to chuckle over and which ones to act upon.

 

ßNancy Casey teaches writing classes at the Recovery Center on Thursdays.  Check the calendar for classes and times.  All are welcome.  She coordinates Recovery Radio, which airs on KRFP 90.3 FM in Moscow Thursdays at 1:05 PM. Recovery Radio needs on-air and off-air volunteers.  Call the Recovery Center  208-883-1045 or email latahrecoverycenter@gmail.com for more information.

 

 

by Nancy Casey

For this week’s exercise, you are going to need at least two pages, so as you gather your writing materials and organize your desk for your writing practice, keep that in mind.

Set one of the pages aside, and on the other, draw two long lines so that the page is divided into three columns.  In the first column, make a list of objects that you have noticed in your life.  Skip a couple of spaces after each one.  You can choose things that are right in front of you at this moment, or objects that you saw at some time in the past, as long as you can still see them clearly with your “mind’s eye.”

Be as specific as you can in naming the objects.  For instance, don’t write “furniture” if you can write “favorite chair.”  Don’t just write “clothes” when you can say “pants I got at the Goodwill on sale for a dollar.”

When you have a dozen or so items spread down the page in the first column, fill in the second column by writing down what color each of the objects is.

The third column in the tricky one.  In that column, name a different object that is the exact same color as the object written in the first column.

Imagine that you wrote “my cereal bowl” in the first column, and in the second column you recorded the fact that it is blue.  For the third column, don’t just write down the name of any old blue thing.  It must be a blue thing whose blue is the exact same blue as the cereal bowl.  You might have to look for it.

I actually found this quite difficult to do.  It took me a long time (two days!) to fill in the third column.  At first I thought it wasn’t going to be possible. Then, gradually, I started noticing or remembering other objects whose colors matched the color of the items in the first column. So if filling in the third column seems hard at first, give yourself some time, take a walk or do a chore, all the while scanning the colors of things for the “match” that you need.  Don’t give up!

When you have filled all three columns, set the page someplace where it is easy to see, and take up a new sheet.  Using what you wrote on the first page as “notes,” write a story or describe a scene with some or all of the objects in it.  Every time you mention something from your lists, show what color it is, not by naming the color, but by saying what other thing is the same color.

What you write can be completely true, completely made up, or a mixture of both. It might come out a little goofy, but it will be interesting, too.  It will be colorful without mentioning a single color!  Here’s an example of what you could write.

Be sure to write the date on your pages and to give them titles.  A title or heading for each column will help you remember what you were trying to do when you look at this page later.

Keep this exercise in mind as you go throughout your week.  Look for matching colors around you.  Keep adding to your list of things that are the same color when you get a chance.  Write another story or add to the one you started.

Are some colors harder to find than others?  Are there colors that are repeated over and over everywhere?

 

Nancy Casey teaches writing classes at the Recovery Center on Thursdays.  Check the calendar for classes and times.  All are welcome.  Nancy also coordinates Recovery Radio, which airs on KRFP 90.3 FM in Moscow Thursdays at 1:05 PM. Recovery Radio needs on-air and off-air volunteers.  Call the Recovery Center  208-883-1045 or email latahrecoverycenter@gmail.com for more information.

 

by Nancy Casey

Warm up your hands by putting your palms together and rubbing gently up and down along the length of your hand, from your wrist to your fingers.  Keep rubbing, maybe 20 or 30 times or more, until you notice that the friction of the rubbing is making a little bit of heat. Don’t try to make friction or heat, just notice when you notice it.

Stop the hand-rubbing and place your hands gently on your face.  Don’t strain or stretch at all.  Have your thumbs more or less along your jawline, your pinky fingers somewhere on your nose, and the rest of your fingers spread comfortably in between. (Impossible to do with glasses on.)

With your hands touching your face, notice the temperature you feel on your skin. Does the skin of your face think your hands are warm or cold?  What is the skin of your hands telling you about the temperature of your face? Don’t try to figure it out or guess at how it is supposed to be, just notice whatever there is to notice about messages coming from your face about your hands, and vice versa.

When you get bored with that, imagine your hands and face are covered in soapsuds, and swipe the suds from your face and shake them off your hands.  Then start rubbing your hands back and forth again. 

As you rub them together, fool around with the way your hands move.  Let the fingers flop between each other.  Then rub them so the fingertips stay in contact and notice how that’s different.  Rotate the hands so they rub at right angles to each other.  Do anything that isn’t stressing or straining as long as your palms and fingers are rubbing together somehow.  Notice where the friction happens and how the heat mounts up, but don’t try to make any extra friction or heat.  Don’t be efficient or purposeful in any way.

After a bit, put your hands back on your face and check out the skin temperature messages again.  Are you more aware of your hands or your face?  The answer is probably, “That depends.”

Swipe away imaginary soapsuds (noticing what that’s like) and return to rubbing your hands. After a bit, touch your face again.  Bring your awareness to the places where skin meets skin and notice the temperatures. Do your hands warm your face?  Does your face cool your hands?  Is it the other way around?

What else can you notice (without trying!) about your hands and your face?  Do your hands give you information about what’s under the skin?  Just by touching (not pressing!) your hands probably register whether they are in contact with something fleshy or bony.  You can also note points of contact and no-contact.  Can you sort out what your face tells you about your hands from what your hands tell you about your face?

When you go back to rubbing your hands together, notice as many different things about your hands as you can. 

Keep on making friction and heat with your hands and then touching your face, noticing what you notice for as long as you want to.  When you are ready to start writing, rub your hands together one last time.  Rub them hard and fast.  At the same time pop your eyes big and wide so your whole body makes the gesture that means, “Ready, set, go! Can’t wait to get to it!”

Take up the pen and notice how it feels in your hand.  Your hands could be so mightily warmed up that you have to change your position in the chair.  Get comfortable.  Where is your face in this picture?

Write about everything you have noticed about your hands and your face.  (Here’s an example.) Notice what your hands and face do as you write.  If you want to notice more things, go back to the hand-rubbing and face-touching part and you probably will.

What about your thoughts? Did you notice any of them? 

Nancy Casey teaches writing classes at the Recovery Center on Thursdays.  Check the calendar for classes and times.  All are welcome.  She coordinates Recovery Radio, which airs on KRFP 90.3 FM in Moscow Thursdays at 1:05 PM. Recovery Radio needs on-air and off-air volunteers.  Call the Recovery Center  208-883-1045 or email latahrecoverycenter@gmail.com for more information.

 

 

by Nancy Casey

Sometimes it feels like we have nothing to write about.  Other times, we can feel so overwhelmed by how much we have to say that no single “thing” to write about stands out.  Even when we do know what we want to write about, it’s often difficult to figure out where to start.

That’s because a piece of writing has a beginning and an end and is “about” something. But our minds and our memories don’t work that way.  We are full of ideas, thoughts, and stories that swim around in there all the time.  They echo and interrupt each other and are never still. Starting to write about one of them can make the others clamor that much harder to get in.

Rather than enforce the discipline that it takes to “write something,” here is a way to take pen to paper and follow your thoughts.  After your mind has had a chance to wander to all the places it likes to go, it is often much easier to think and write clearly about one thing.  See if this works for you. 

Begin with a clean sheet of paper, and have a second one handy.  Turn the page sideways so it is wider than it is tall.  In the center, write your Start Word.  This can be a topic that has been on your mind, the first word that pops into your head, or a word you point to randomly from a book.  Draw a circle (or any shape, really) around the Start Word.

What does the Start Word make you think of?  A new word? A story? A person who uses the word? Whatever comes to mind, write that thought down in a word or two, draw a shape around it, and connect to the shape surrounding your Start Word. 

Now it’s as if you have two Start Words.  What pops into your head next?  Write down a word for that idea and enclose it in a shape.  Draw a line to show which word it is connected to..  Now three words have jiggled loose from your memory.  Keep going. What pops into your head next? Try to fill up the whole page with shapes that hold words and show their connections. 

You will find that the words inside the shapes and the lines connecting them wander all over the page, just like your mind wanders wherever it can wander to.  It’s fun to see how far afield related thoughts and stories can take you.

At some point when you go to write a word or a phrase, you might get an urge to tell a whole story or explain a big idea. If a whole lot more words want to tumble out about a single topic, take up the second sheet of paper and let the words flow.

Sometimes it turns out that everything you put into this web of shapes is mostly about one topic.  If that happens, use the web of shapes as your “notes” and write about the topic on the second sheet of paper.

You could find that one area of the web of connections really stands out for you.  You can write about that on the second sheet if that’s what seems like the right thing to do next. 

What if you don’t feel like shifting over to writing sentences and paragraphs? Then choose an area of the web of connections you have made and, using it as a rough draft, make a different fancier version of it on the second page.

Give a different title to the two pages you have made.  Add any doodles or illustrations you think they require.  Put the date somewhere on the page as well.  Here is an example of what someone might write.

Try this multiple times throughout the week.  Notice which type of writing comes easier to you, the web of ideas or the sentences and paragraphs.  It will probably be different on different days.

Nancy Casey teaches at the Recovery Center on Thursdays.  531 S. Main St. in Moscow.  Check the calendar for classes and times.  All are welcome.  Call the Recovery Center  208-883-1045 or email latahrecoverycenter@gmail.com for more information.

 

 

by Nancy Casey

In order to do today’s writing prompt, you will probably have to take a walk.  You don’t have to take any of your writing materials with you.  Leave them on the table, ready to go, so you can sit down and begin to write as soon as you get home.

The writer Brenda Ueland said that she always began her writing time with a walk.  She walked without any particular destination and only walked places where she was sure she wouldn’t get caught up in conversation with anyone.  She walked fast or slow, whatever the mood, and tried to observe her surroundings.  She said that every time she accidentally walked a little farther than she had expected, the writing always turned out better.

In order to do today’s writing prompt, you will first have to remember the person you were four years ago and recall what was important in your life then.  Think about that on your walk.  That will be much more pleasant than trying to remember all these things while you sit at your desk.

While you are walking, try to recall the place you lived four years ago.  Where did you buy your groceries?  Did you live alone or with others?  What kind of work did you do?  Who were your friends and what did you do together? Did you have a favorite place to go? What did you like best about your life? Did you have a hobby?

Maybe you can remember the person you were four years ago by jumping backwards year by year?  What was going on in your life a year ago today?  How was your health? What kinds of things were on your mind?  Where did you spend your days?  How was your attitude?  What about the year before that?  And before that? Can you remember?

While you are walking and remembering details from the past, watch how your recollection of what it was like to be you four years ago refills itself. As you walk, you can also start thinking about the question you will have to answer when you get home:

What have you learned in the last four years?

Every time something changes we learn something.  Sometimes we choose it, and sometimes we are just stuck with it, but changes always teach us something. So when you think about all the things that are different in your life from four years ago, ask yourself what you learned in the process of change.

Things that stay the same teach us, too.  We keep things in our life that sustain us and teach us things we want to learn.  Hobbies, habits, jobs, friends and relations, the weather, plants and pets and everyday objects.  Everything and everyone around us teaches us something, whether they change or stay the same.

Ideas change us, too.  Ideas come to us from the outside in the form of information.  That information can change ideas we already have.  Sometimes we rearrange information in our minds and create new ideas that way.  What ideas to you have now that you didn’t have four years ago?

Every time you learn something, does that mean you have a new skill?

Let your mind wander randomly over these things as you take your walk. Four years ago…  What was your life like?  What were you doing?  And now?  What can you do that you couldn’t do then?  What do you know that you didn’t know then?  When you get back to your desk, write down as much as you can remember.

Here is an example of the kind of thing you might write.

When you have finished, doodle on the page a little bit until you think of a good title.  Put the title at the top.  Write the date somewhere on the page as well.

Nancy Casey teaches at the Recovery Center on Thursdays and coordinates Recovery Radio.  531 S. Main St. in Moscow.  Check the calendar for classes and times.  All are welcome.  Call the Recovery Center  208-883-1045 or email latahrecoverycenter@gmail.com for more information.