Welcome to the 17th day of the 2010 Harbor Street Christmas Celebration! Today we have a guest post from writer Jean Schara. And after her excellent post, I announce the winner of the Second Drawing! Now enjoy Jean's writing!
Five Minutes
By Jean Schara
This month, I'm participating in an effort called Reverb10. The idea is to spend the month of December reflecting on 2010 and projecting to 2011. Different authors have submitted prompts to cover each day during the month of December. December 15th's prompt, submitted by Patti Digh, was titled, "5 minutes. Imagine you will completely lose your memory of 2010 in five minutes. Set an alarm for five minutes and capture the things you most want to remember about 2010."
At first I scoffed just a little at this prompt. Heh, I thought. I forget pretty near everything already. That's nothing new. But, I've answered every prompt in some way, and there was no reason not to answer this prompt. I glanced at the clock and began typing in today's entry at 750words.com (where I've written at least 750 words each day for the last 184 days). I started out a little slow, but I only had five minutes, so I tried to type as rapidly as I could. I surprised myself with the number of items I came up with to remember. Of course, it was reflecting upon the full year, so five minutes shouldn't have been long enough. When the five minutes was up, I stopped.
Then I thought, What if I decided to spend five minutes each day reflecting on the day -- because what if I would forget everything about that day I hadn't written down? If we did that for each remaining day of our lives -- just five minutes -- over time, we'd have an amazing collection of life happenings. Imagine getting to this point in the year in 2011 and being able to read back over the things we most want to remember about 2011. Imagine discovering we'd captured, in only five minutes per day over the past year, those vital memories?
Would we have gone looking for good things? Would we have focused on bad things? Which would be better to be reflecting on? Sometimes, a hard time is worth remembering if only to reassure ourselves that we were strong and better times did eventually come around. Mine? I'm not going to detail it here, but mostly, I focused on good things, but with a twinge of, shall I say, bitterness in one area. It's an as yet unresolved area of my life, but I am working with sincere hopes of being ultimately happy with the results. Like most "in progress" efforts, it has its ups and downs.
What do you think? How many things do you remember from 2010 that you don't want to forget? Take five minutes and capture those things somewhere -- in an on-line private journal like 750words.com, in a blog, or maybe in a personal notebook, calendar page, or computer word processor or text file somewhere. It doesn't matter where, but get it down. Then, I challenge you to spend five minutes at some time each day during the next year and capture what you most want to remember about that day. If you miss a day, don't worry. Just start again where you left off.
***
Thanks, Jean, for guest posting! Hope y'all enjoyed it as much as I did.
And now ... The winner of the Second Drawing on the 2010 Harbor Street Celebration is KTC! Congratulations! (KTC, let me know your postal address so I can mail your prizes to you! Thanks for participating!)
See you here tomorrow!
Buy Floozy and Other Stories in paperback at Lulu.com
Buy Floozy and Other Stories in hardcover at Lulu.com
Buy Murder by Dewey Decimal at Amazon.com
Buy Murder by Dewey Decimal at Barnes&Noble.com
Buy Murder by Dewey Decimal at BooksAMillion.com
Buy Murder by Dewey Decimal at Lulu.com
Buy Murder by the Acre at Amazon.com
Buy Murder by the Acre at Barnes & Noble.com
Buy Murder by the Acre at BooksAMillion.com
Buy Murder by the Acre in soft cover at Lulu.com
Buy Murder by the Acre in hardcover at Lulu.com
Buy Floozy, MBTA & MBDD items and more at Oakleaf Harbor
4 comments:
Thank you for the opportunity, Stephen. I love what you do here at 51313 Harbor Street every December, and I feel honored to be asked to contribute this year.
A Marvelous Idea Jean. I'm going to try to do this. Thanks for sharing! And Merry Christmas to you!!!
I think it is a wonderful idea. At church, we are encouraged to journal regularly and I know several people that are good at it. They often review what they wrote and find insight into their lives and get to relive some very special moments, like the birth of a child or grandchild, for example. I really need to do that myself. Thanks for the encouragement.
That's a good idea, Jean. I'm going to look into Reverb10, too. Not so sure this is a year I want to remember, but then again, some very good things have come out of it... ;)
Post a Comment