This week, a close friend told me about the value she’s found in positive affirmations. She said that they’ve helped to keep her hopeful when she was close to giving up on something that mattered to her. It’s been a while since I practiced affirmations regularly, and I could use some extra hopefulness these days. I told my friend I was going to try working with affirmations this week. “Maybe I’ll try them in front of the mirror,” I said. That’s a thing,…

Like most people, I complain about winter. I bemoan the cold. I talk about how annoying it is to pile on and peel off layers of clothing. I say that I’m unmotivated to go outside. This winter, however, I’ve had to ask myself whether all of this, or any of it, is true. If I’m being honest, January has been sort of lovely in its deep wintriness. On the most wet or cold nights, I’ve curled up at home, catching up on TV…

I lost track of yesterday, but I didn’t lose track of the thing that I wanted to share with you. It’s a post that I saw on Instagram, actually, and promptly shared in my stories. It’s from Tumblr and attributed to the author flowerais. It reads: a big part of being happy is being excited. be excited for everything – making a cup of tea, decorating your future apartment, seeing a friend again, falling in love unexpectedly, the next episode of a show…

On Monday afternoon, as the long weekend was wrapping up, I wrote about the importance of planning. I’d had that topic on my mind because I’d failed to plan the work I wanted to get done on Saturday. As a result, both Saturday and Sunday were full of frustrating, distracted, halfhearted attempts to be productive. Not a great way to spend what could have been a satisfying and enjoyable long weekend. Another area where I failed to plan (and thereby planned to fail)…

I had a grand plan to get a lot of recipe testing done over the past weekend, and none of it got done. When I looked back in frustration on why I’d failed to actually cook anything, it was very clear to me that I didn’t really have a plan. I had ideas of the finished recipes that I wanted to make, and I had a bunch of ingredients in the fridge. But I hadn’t sat down and planned how I’d get from…

I had such high hopes for the first week of the new year! In spite of an up-and-down holiday season, I did get some quality rest between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. So I was ready to hit the ground running when I returned to my practice on Tuesday morning. On New Year’s Eve, I couldn’t deny the fact that I felt as though I might be getting a cold. I was relieved to feel a bit better on Monday, and I got…