Sunday, July 31, 2011

The Word is “Slow”


At David and Leigh’s wedding three months ago I got into an intense discussion about journaling with one of Leigh’s bridesmaids, Kristy Cuskelly. We both agreed we’d like to be more faithful about keeping our journals (or blog for that matter), but unfortunately “life” often got in the the way, and we both kept putting things off.
Kristy suggested that an easy way to keep a journal would be to pick one word that encapsulated what we’d experienced that day and just leave it at that. For some reason, I woke up thinking about her words this morning, and I've been mulling them over ever since.
I think my word for today has to be slow because that’s basically how the day unfolded. But what does slow really tell you? I could decide to take things as slowly as possible in order to savor each moment. Maybe things could go very slowly for me, but not in a satisfying way. Or I might just decide to be lazy and describe it as slow. Yes, the word can mean so many different things. On its own, slow is like a poem, then once you start writing about it, or trying to visualize it, slow turns into something else. So what did slow mean to me today? Go with the flow.

(Speaking of journaling, you might want to check out Strathmore’s free visual journaling workshops at
http://www.strathmoreartist.com/vj-workshop-about.html.)