Letters for Creatives #63: Building an enjoyable routine

Enjoying daily life and balancing everything else if there is a way

Hello, I am Celeste. Welcome all of you who are new here, including Christine, Kelly, Anna and Sandy. Take a look at my writing prompts and the newsletter directory to find what you need now.

Photo by Daniel Casson

It is the first day that I start to track my habits again and it feels like I am being intentional with my time again. In case you are curious, I am tracking daily planning, workout, meditation, reading, journalling, daily review and self care.

I am not restricting myself to do everything for a set period of time. It feels right to just let myself do them for however long I want and implement them in my life.

Hobbies as your lifeline

I spent the last few years working on myself and did not give myself much time to just enjoy life. After I started writing poems and stories, I picked up hobbies that I neglected because I do not have the time.

But why am I here if I am not enjoying the only life I am going to have? (If you believe in reincarnation, that would be a completely different life.) Anne Helen Peterson pointed that enjoying our hobbies or playing “the guitar became a lifeline: a means to concentrate fully on something that had absolutely nothing to do with work, or anything else, really”.

We must preserve those inclinations toward delight and whimsy, toward the ineffable and the unimpressive, the feelings you can’t re-create with a machine or optimize for peak productivity. They are worth rediscovering not because they will allow us to rest and, as such, make us better workers—but because they anchor us to who, at heart, we’ve always been.

How I write consistently

It seems that I could not stop subscribing to newsletters. Anna Codrea-Rado writes her newsletter about freelance work, how she writes consistently and more. She tells true stories with joy, frustration and makes me feel I am not the only one that is making it up as I go.

Life is unpredictable. But the creative and writing process is even more so, I think. All I can do is let the ideas come and decide if I want to follow those ideas.

Think like a Norwegian in difficult times

It has not been pleasing since 2020. But we can learn to think like Norwegians to lift ourselves out of a rut and not be stuck.

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See you in 2 weeks,

Celeste

Related:

Set intention with your time

Tips to arrange your time as a writer or artist