For the past few years I’ve been making lists. Not To Do lists - those kind of lists never worked for me. I’ve been making lists of the things I love, an exercise from Julia Cameron’s ‘25 Things I Love’ exercise.⠀
The process of writing the list itself is very sweet and childlike. It’s delightful when we simply put pen to paper and declare the things we love.
Making fires ⠀
The sea ⠀
Sunsets ⠀
Nature ⠀
People
It can be hard to write the list at first. It can feel too obvious, too silly, or worse, too painful. We can find celebration and gratitude for our life if we discover that our list is present in our every day. We can find small moments of delight in remembering that we love spaghetti bolognese and that we will cook it for dinner tonight because we cannot remember the last time we ate it. And we can also find confusion or sadness if the list we made and the life we are living feel worlds apart.
In the process of doing this exercise, we start to see more clearly whether the ingredients on the list we have made feature in the life we are living. And if we want, we can begin our own process of bringing more of the things we love into the life we are living. We can create a life we love by starting with something as simple as making a list. Then each day, keep adding more of the ingredients in. ⠀
Then over time, as we feed ourselves more and more of what we love, we build more and more courage. Courage in our ability to create - to bring something into existence.
I recently moved (from London) to Devon because it’s much easier to make fires, swim in the sea, walk in nature, watch the sunset and see the stars here. Julia Cameron herself still practices her own tools and moved from Manhattan to Santa Fe as a result of her 25 Things I Love list. “I wrote juniper, sage brush, chili, mountains and sky and I said, ‘This is not the Chrysler Building.’” (The New York Times). I love that we can write ourselves home (quite literally in some cases) by simply writing a list.
Why not give it a go for yourself and see what comes up.