Patricia Harrelson

On my last day in Ashland, I walked with two other women, Kim and Haley, to buy squash soup at Pangea restaurant. All along the way, we read freestyle chalked graffiti on the sidewalks–the late night mischief of our fellow travelers to theater-land. We laughed at the imagination apropos in each line we encountered.

As we waited for our soup, we each spoke about one thing we would take with us from the trip. Haley described being particularly moved by a line from “Our Town” about the swiftness of 1000 days passing.  The gist of the quote was about “realizing life while you live it.” She was going to write in her journal every day for a 1000 days, beginning right then. Kim and I decided to join her in this plan, and we made a pact that we would each write daily.

I’ve written in my journal for 7 days straight. Right from the start, I struggled with whether to write about daily happenings or “practice” creative writing. I’ve written in a journal intermittently for years. For instance, I generally write when I’m on a trip like the one to Ashland, noting emotions, sights, impulses, and plans that arise from being in a new and different place. Whenever I teach writing classes, I write with my students to the prompts I give them. Sometimes, I get on a roll at home and write for several days or weeks using pictures or poems or nature as prompts, but then for reasons unknown I stop this daily journaling. So the commitment to write for 1000 days is challenging, particularly in terms of what to write.

This morning, I wrote several pages about what I should be writing and why I was writing, and then I decided to get one of my favorite books off the shelf– Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones— to point me in a more fruitful direction.  I opened the book and read several pages, and when I came to a segment called “Nervously Sipping Wine” on page 66, I knew I’d found the guidance I was looking for.

Here’s the suggestion that did it for me.  Goldberg recommended for a starting line to “take the first half of your sentence from a newspaper article and finish the sentence with an ingredient listed in a cookbook.” I modified these instructions because I didn’t feel like getting up to retrieve her ingredients. Instead, I copied a line from the AARP Bulletin that was sitting on the end table by my chair and finished it with a phrase from the Columbia Nursery Newsletter also sitting nearby.

Woah!!! From that first line emerged two pages of the best stuff I’ve written in a LONG time.

Try it! It’s a powerful journal exercise not unlike mischievously composing sidewalk graffiti in chalk.  And while you’re at it, join my friends and me in writing in your journal for 1000 days. Maybe we can all do a better job of realizing life while we live it.

If you do decided to commit, how about making the commitment public by dropping a statement to that effect in the comment section here.

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