52 Weeks Of Kindness: Do Something Kind For Yourself

The concept of this theme is summed up simply by the directions you are given on an airplane to put on your own air mask before helping those next to you. Why? Because to be able to do anything well, you need to first take care of yourself.

This is easy for some people and hard for others. It can also be confusing. Consider ways you can be kind to yourself that allow you to be in the best position to fulfill your unique potential. What things do you do that fill you with joy, that literally inspire you (fill you with spirit)?

But what about the idea of self-indulgence? Indeed, in our culture we seem to have made synonymous the prioritizing of ourselves with self-indulgence, selfishness, and even arrogance. I think in our hearts we know the difference. Pay attention to this, especially if you find this theme is a challenge for you.

As the week progresses, take time to reflect on your ongoing experience with the theme. Is it hard for you to prioritize yourself? If so, consider why. By the end of the week, make sure you have completed your act AND have summarized your experience in your journal. Try to make your summary concise, yet complete.

Be aware that I’m using the word "act" in the broadest sense. You may find that for you the best way to fulfill a theme is in a metaphorical way rather than a literal way. A kindness act can be a shift in your awareness or attitude. Paying attention to your internal processes and aligning with your own inner knowledge isn't indulgent, although it sometimes may look that way to others. The key is being honest with yourself.

Something Inside So Strong

I know that I can make it, though you're doing me wrong, so wrong...

Sleeping Beauty

When he brought the water, she placed a cosmetics case with copper corners, like a grandmother's trunk, on her lap, and took two golden pills from a box that contained others of various colours. She did everything in a methodical, solemn way, as if nothing unforeseen had happened to her since her birth. At last she pulled down the shade on the window, lowered the back of her seat as far as it would go without taking off her shoes, put on a sleeping mask, turned her back to me, and then slept without a single pause, without a sigh, without the slightest change in position, for the eight eternal hours and twelve extra minutes of the flight to New York.

(Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane, Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

My Idea of Heaven

No, ordinary things and good
I'd choose: friends, wise and kind and few;
A country house, a pretty wood
To walk in; books both old and new.

To read, a life retired, apart,
Where leisure and repose might dwell
With industry; a little art;
Perhaps a little fame as well.

Lytton Strachey, March 1920

I Am Beautiful

I AM BEAUTIFUL because I am five feet small.
And for everything else there are five-inch heels.
I am beautiful because I know songs from every decade since
the 1930s in two languages and I can almost always sing
along accurately.
I am beautiful because I read Tolstoy for fun and Cosmo when
I mean business.
I am beautiful because I am the crazy curled girl child
moving to the percussion beat of her own spirit like a maniac.
I am beautiful because I can throw my beer and tequila down
like a woman.
I am beautiful because I know exactly when to stop.
I am beautiful because I am too pretty to ever have to try too hard.
I am beautiful because poetry gives me electric goosebumps.
I am beautiful because the tigers still come to find me
sometimes in the night
although it has been one thousand two hundred and
seventy-nine nights
since they buried you in the ground, I always let myself cry.
I am beautiful because I can wear polka dots and pair them
with stripes
I am beautiful because I pretend I'm doing photo shoots and
arena concerts in the shower.
I am beautiful because I put on eyeliner to go to the
gas station.
I am beautiful because I am not capable of leaving anyone.
I am beautiful because I have become capable of letting people
leave me.
I am beautiful because I am not afraid to be ugly.
I am beautiful because I can parallel park on a two-way street.
I am beautiful because I am my father's daughter.
I am beautiful because I know a calculator is a little understood
sign from God
that we do not need to study Mathematics.
I am beautiful because I say I am.
I am beautiful because when I am sad, I buy myself a pack of pencils
and sharpen them till I feel better about myself.
I am beautiful because I know someone else is never the
solution to you.
I am beautiful for my yesterdays and my tomorrows but mostly
for this very second.
I am beautiful because my morning cup of coffee
completes me.
I am beautiful because I have dated bad boys and good boys
and ugly boys and pretty boys
only to finally realise all I needed was a man.
I am beautiful because I say I am.
I am beautiful beyond measure. I am a measure of beautiful.
I am a beautiful measure.
I am beautiful. I am.

(Pooja Nansi)

Those Tiny, Invisible, Loving Human Forces

I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big successes. I am for those tiny, invisible, loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of human pride.

(William James)

I assure you, all my books were first rate before they were written...

I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross: that it's to be pulled through only in breathless anguish. Now when I sit down to an article, I have a net of words which will come down on the idea certainly in an hour or so. But a novel, as I say, to be good, should be seen, before one writes it, something unwriteable: but only visible so that for nine months one lives in despair, and only when one has forgotten what one meant, does the book seem tolerable. I assure you, all my books were first rate before they were written...

(Virginia Woolf in a letter to Vita Sackville-West)