letter writing = self-care

Read time: 2 ½ minutes

Good morning my friend,

I’m delighted to see you again at Merry Makery.

Time for your weekly mmm — mindset, mission, & musings — about time.

How is it 2023? How is it almost February? I graduated high school how many years ago? I am guilty of way too frequently saying — where is time going?!

Seems to be that we accept that as we age time “speeds up”

BUT we don’t have to accept this.

We have within our power, the ability to slow down time with this week’s mindset & mission.

Mindset

Let’s dwell in the novel.

This exact moment, minute, breath has never happened before and will never happen again. We are surrounded by new, striking, sensational, & state-of-the-art things.

Yet we miss them all the time.

We miss so many novelties because we get familiar.

According to David Eagleman, a neuroscientist specialized in the brain’s perception of time, the more familiar the world becomes, the more quickly time passes. He believes that

Since time is a finite resource, shouldn’t we be doing everything we can to make time expand rather than shrink?

Mission

To change this, we are going to find the novel

Slow down time by experiencing something new & different. Two ways to find the novel in your life:

1. Through action: Do something completely out of the ordinary. Try new things. Meet new people. Taste new foods. Travel to new places.

2. Through observation: Look for what is novel, random, or magical in what is happening around you.

If you really want to soak in the novelty, i’m a huge fan of writing down your experiences.

This builds on what we talked about last week of living with a beginner’s mindset and spending time off of auto-pilot.

Jump off the crazy hamster wheel of life, even for just a few minutes, and find the novel nuggets hidden in the blur.

Musing

I wrote a novel last week….

On notecards to all of you to show my appreciation

& I loved every minute.

Many would see writing thank you’s as a chore. How many people dread holiday thank you’s? And how many newlyweds moan about writing them?

I think we categorize letter writing incorrectly.

We bucket it into life admin, another metaphorical bill to pay.

I believe that letter writing deserves to be categorized with self-care.

When done with intention, writing a letter fills your need for connection in two ways by allowing you to:

• Slow down & connect with yourself

• Show up & appreciate someone else

I felt so damn good after writing y’all letters & I hope y’all feel equally excellent when your first Merry Makery mail arrives.

My first edition notecards feature 3 magic words that I believe we all need to hear to help us appreciate how novel we ourselves truly are. I’m obsessed with these cards & they will be my first designs in my 100 day challenge of creating a new card every day, which will be starting in Feb.

We are moments away from the party finally starting.

Expect big news next week !!!

Counting down the minutes til next Monday!

MacK