BYE-BYE "SHOULD", HELLO "WANT TO"

Recently, it's been "Bye-bye to-do list, hello What do I WANT TO DO list." This campaign has been a way to break from being such a task-master and open up some diversity and creativity in my daily life.

I noticed that if I stick only to checking off the daily to-dos, I get bored, resentful, and stale.

Sunday was a good example. I knew I should clean the house, go to the gym, and a million other things. But it was such a pretty day and the image of The Brooklyn Botanical Gardens kept popping into my head. I bought a Sunday Times and plunked myself down at a table there with a lemonade, letting a throng of thousands of people swirl and ebb around me. There were so many pretty flowers out!

Yesterday, I was supposed to go to a pilates class I know I should attend every Wednesday. But I went with what I wanted to do - rolled into The Housing Works Book Cafe, an old favorite of mine in SoHo; picked up a few tacos at the warehouse-loft/garage-ish Tacombi in the same 'hood, and went into the Chinatown Y to do some stretches.

I was so happy when I saw my horoscope today on Daily Om. It confirmed that what I am doing is a good thing!

May 12, 2011

Novel Patterns

Scorpio Daily Horoscope

An avant-garde mood can descend upon you suddenly today, prompting you to look for ways of imbuing your existence with a greater degree of creativity. Your search for ideas can take you on a wild and intensely moving journey through books, museums, and meetings. If you truly want to open your life to imagination and novelty, you will likely need to look at your own choices first. You may discover that today you have been locked into patterns of thinking and behavior that have kept you from fulfilling your creative potential. This can be a wonderful time to distance yourself from these patterns by pursuing a new range of activities and events.

We break new ground and broaden the borders of our existence when we move away from our routine patterns in order to explore fresh methods of being and doing. Though we can never escape certain elements of our experience entirely, we can nonetheless identify unexplored areas of interest and use those as a starting point from which to immerse ourselves in new patterns. Doing this allows us to determine definitively whether the routines, habits, and preferences we have long embraced are truly meeting our individual needs. Should we discover that there is a deficiency in one area or another, we are already primed to investigate alternative ways of patterning our lives because we are approaching the matter with an open mind. Your openness to fresh concepts and methodologies can give you an advantage when you decide to build a better life today.

Image Credit: Bella Foster