Daily Aspirations... Go.

"If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be." - Joseph Campbell

I started this journal on December 31st of 2013 with the goal to write 300 entries over the course of the next year. Those entries were to entail the steps I was taking and progress I was making toward living more in line with, well, myself, really. I wanted to find and follow my own personal bliss and this was supposed to be the chronicle of that. Twenty-some entries later, we all know that didn't happen entirely as planned --or at all. 2014 was a rough year. There was very little bliss-seeking involved as I struggled to break free of the morass it felt was enveloping me from all sides.  There were points of light to the past year, my trip to NYC being a game changer, but on the whole it was just awful and there was more personal defeat than growth. What growth happened, though, was important, and it's with that in mind that I move forward with a new goal for this space in the new year.

Days to Bliss will now be updated daily. I realize that was part of the goal last year, with some wiggle room put in for sake of sanity, but there was no focus beyond just that. This year I am going to start each day with a new aspiration: a (sometimes tiny) goal to be completed by the end of the day. Each day's aspiration will be chosen with the mindset that my life with be better in some way for having achieved this thing. That doesn't mean that the goal has to be anything exciting, spiritual, or important. Some days, and probably many days, the goals will be mundane daily choirs such as "make sure all the dishes are done." Other days they will be self-care ranging from "meditate for ten minutes" to "spend a little time playing that game you've been wanting to but haven't allowed yourself time to." There will be days that the goals will be more ethereal like "meditate for ten minutes" or "do a reading with the Faeries Oracle" or more personal growth based such as "make someone smile" or "create a gift for someone." There will be days when the goals are much bigger, too. I'm not putting any stipulations on this except that it will be daily and that whatever it is I will be better for having done it.

Whether I blog with the goal at the beginning of the day before it's accomplished, or later after it's achieved, will be depend on the day, the goal, and any other variable under the sun. Sometimes, I'll talk a lot about whatever the aspiration of the day is and other times I'll simply mention it and move on to write about something else. The scope of this blog won't be limited to simply logging daily goals. I'm allowing myself the freedom to talk about whatever I want here, from day to day, with the obligation to log my goals acting as the motivational crux rather than a discouraging restriction.

Today's aspiration was to move forward with this, get it set up, and write this entry. It took more work than I anticipated as I am trying to migrate my online identity to use my pen name and personal alias rather than my legal name. The process of separating the two while maintaining creative and professional integrity is tricky, but ultimately worth it. It meant that I had to spend time not only here on Blogger today, making changes, but also on Ravelry to bring the patterns I store here in line with this endeavor. It's done and I do feel better for it. It's a goal well achieved. Day one down. On into the future.

"We're not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes.” - Joseph Campbell