Day Twelve

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So my main objective with this blog, right? I figured that thirty days is long enough that habits start forming--things start becoming second nature. My theory was that after one full month, I'd have trained myself to automatically catch opportunities before the fear set in, to immediately search for ways in which I could help someone out, to instinctively note the picturesque-factor in something that, beforehand, I might've overlooked. And so, in skipping as many days as I had, I was pretty shit scared that I'd lose all the progress I'd made so far. I went into today assuming that it was going to be as difficult as day one had been. I don't think I've ever been so thrilled to be wrong. 

"Habits are to the soul what the veins and arteries are to the blood--the courses in  which it moves." -Horace Bushnell 

• Show two people how much they mean to me

(1). Picked up some coffee for a Mr. Pattwell. Anyone else catching a trend here? If caffeine's the most widely abused psychoactive drug in the world, then this blog's put me pretty far up there on the trafficking hierarchy. 

(2). Told a Mr. Nathaniel, plain and simple, "I care about you." Actions speak louder than words.  "Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly. They'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced." True story, Aldous Huxley. True story. 

• Help out a stranger

Taped fifty cents to a parking meter. Your first two hours of New Paltz parking are on me, random hypothetical stranger from the future. 

• Live instead of sleeping

Woke up early and walked again. Don't think I'll ever ever ever get tired of walks in the snow. 

• Do something good for myself, by myself

Got these guys in the mail today. Turns out that I only need a select few for that contemplative thought class I was talking about earlier, so I'm going to <dweeb> roll up in a ball with one of the not-assigned ones before bed and do some leisure reading for the first time since I started classes. </dweeb> The nonstop combination of Shakespeare, colonial essays, and old dead guys' autobiographies is enough to make me wanna take an ice pick to my retinas.

• Write here and write elsewhere

Check and check. 

• Make a conscious decision to leave my comfort zone

So today I was herpderping outside the classroom during a break from my three-hour, and these six or seven kids were having this pretty epic discussion about somethingorother. I didn't know any of them particularly well, and initially I did hesitate, but I found it was nowhere near as hard as it used to be to push myself to just walk over. That's when I realized that somewhere along the line, this situation--this one thing that used to make me want to shit bricks--had stopped scaring me so much. I quit being afraid to just talk to people. I figure, yeah, there's always a chance that some kid'll label me the creepy chick who lurks into conversations, but then again, I figure there's a bigger chance of people actually talking back. 

• Take three pictures of three beautiful things.

(1). See above. 
(2). See below. 
(3). See this picture of pictures. Picception. Yeah. This room's only just starting to feel like home, but I gotta admit, seeing these kids every time I look up from my computer? Makes the transition a whole lot easier. 

• Meditate

I'll knock this one out right before bed. 

• Look up at the sky 

Funny thing, mistakes. Sometimes they turn out way more beautiful than any intended action. 

Accidentally snapped this on my phone while I was trying to send out a text. The flash caught the snowflakes while they were falling from the sky. Kind of look a bit like shooting stars, no? 

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