This Can Be Joyful

"The sacrifice which causes sorrow to the doer of the sacrifice is no sacrifice. Real sacrament lightens the mind of the doer and gives him a sense of peace and joy. The Buddha gave up the pleasures of life because they had become painful to him." - Ghandi

Every year I attempt to give something up for Lent - chocolate, fast food, soda, etc. This usually results in massive failure (I think there were only two years where I actually made it all 40 days). This year I want to do something different, something other than omitting some kind of food from my diet. Because truthfully, I've been eating really healthy lately, I hardly ever drink soda anymore and I eat something of the "fast food" variety maybe only once every couple of weeks. And chocolate? As I've learned in the past, my attempting to give up chocolate only results in failure and a meltdown of catastrophic proportions in which I have dreams of drowning in a vat of Hershey's syrup. No good.

Instead of giving something up this Lent, I'm going to take something on. After all, this is my year of change and trying new things. I'd like to add more to my life, not take things away.

Lately, I've been experiencing some kind of creative surge. So why not take advantage of that? Why not harness some of that creativity and actually write it down? Put it on the page? My problem is that I work for eight hours a day and when I come home all I want to do is plop down in front of the television and be mindlessly entertained by fictional characters (not of my making). Sitting down to my computer and actually attempting to form my thoughts into coherent sentences takes effort. And yes, I am a lazy human being.

The creativity is there, I just need to figure out a way of harnessing it. But how?

A couple years ago I worked though a book called "The Artists Way" by Julia Cameron. Essentially, it's a workbook that inspires creative thinking to break through writer's block. It's actually pretty helpful and provides a different way of viewing the creative process. Soon after I finished "The Artist's Way" I picked up the second book, "Walking in the World," a continuation of the process. However, I never actually even opened it. Such is life.

But lately I've found myself thinking about that book again. One of the steps of The Artists Way is called "Morning Pages" - three daily journal pages of stream of conscience writing. This can be tough. Sometimes I would find myself jotting things down like, "just keep writing dammit." As annoying as they were though, they were helpful in clearing my mind for the day ahead. This could be good for me right now.

So this is what I'm taking on. Here, at the start of Lent, I will finally open "Walking in this World" and step back into my creative life. It's not a task, it's not something I going to dread and hate. Hopefully, as I move through the coming weeks, it it something that will fill me with a "sense of peace and joy."