The Experiment – A 365 Day Search For Happiness

It has been a year of enormous change and growth since beginning this blog experiment 337 days ago. I could not have imagined or foretold what would have happened, and it is still unfolding, and it is a revelation.

The thing that I have learned about undertaking a 365 day journey is that it is not just a succession of blog posts that you are doing, you are undertaking a daily practice that is going to change your life. I believe this happens when you deeply commit to any daily practice, and I will also say that I believe the popular “100 Days” practices are not long enough. I’ve done them, they’re fun, but to effect serious change you have to go the distance, you have to do it for a full year, 365 days. The depth of your commit born out over time, showing up every single day no matter what, has proven to be the deepest thing I’ve ever known. I am, quite frankly, astonished, I could not have fathomed that so much would happen in one year.

And things build on one another. One thing happens, and then another thing, and it snowballs, and one day something big happens that has been deep inside you all along but which you could not have come to without peeling the layers, and building up momentum. Like baking a cake the heat and pressure of a daily practice takes you some place you would never have gotten to otherwise. This happened to me with the creation of The Sunday Night Writing Group almost 2 months ago. It is the work I have done for nearly 40 years but which I laid to rest after the fire and could never seem to get back to. And then the class started, it has been a dream, it is going phenomenally well. And writing and teaching new material every single week has awakened in me all of the work that I have done, created, or tried to create but which never came to fruition in the way that I had hoped. New work, exciting work, too. And I can say with certainty that none of it would have happened without this 365 day experiment which is why the day after this experiment ends I will be starting Day 1 of the next 365 experiment. This is now one of the most important things that I do, blogging daily, and I don’t want to stop the flow of the life-changing practice that it is.

So what is coming? Well I have mentioned that I am working on a book coming out of The Sunday Night Writing Group classes, and I am. But it is going to be a long journey because it will come out of one year’s worth of writing and teaching this material. Once the year is up I will continue teaching the classes but I will take the material from the first year and edit and rewrite it to form a year’s journey with this practice. I am very excited about it but it will take time. Having realized that I have set myself some shorter term goals that I am very excited about.

Currently I am making projections for how I want my work to go in the years ahead. What is happening for me is this. I have written that I have been in a precarious position since the fire when I lost not just a house full of material goods and my 4 beloved parrots but all the financial security that I had. This led to me coming to rely on a number of social services that I could not be without for health care in a multitude of ways. If I made not much income I would lose the services and my life would have been insupportable and terrifying. But I recently found something out. Next year, on April 30, I turn 65. When I do I have to get Medicare. It’s not a choice, you are fined if you don’t get it, and when I do get it I no longer qualify for the services I am now relying on anyway. Hence I can begin to make income because the services that I now rely on will not be there anymore, nothing to lose for the most part. This was a very exciting thing to learn because it’s a terrible thing to be in your 60’s with the possibility of living another 20 or 30 years and not be able to do meaningful work in the world. I am not a person who can live without doing meaningful work and this had led to a great deal of anxiety and depression in my life. It is as though a dark cloud that has been hovering over me is passing and the light of day and new hope and the ability to finally be able to plan for new work in 6 months or so has arrived. It is a gift beyond measure, and so I have begun making plans.

The first thing that I have already begun working on is a little book I am already in love with (My daughter Rachel, a psychologist, has seen the beginning notes for this book and loves it and is very excited about it too!) and an accompanying eCourse. From there I am planning to introduce a number of small books + eCourses every 6 months to 1 year. This will lead to a number of books for sale on amazon in the years ahead and eCourses on my website that will provide passive ongoing income over time. I have the first 3 eCourses outlined in a folder I have created on my desktop and will be working on ongoing. I will also be returning, in 2019, to private mentoring which I loved doing, was good at, and really feel is an important facet of my combined works as a whole. Everything will be interrelated, the growth will be organic, I am not going to be putting undue pressure on myself but doing what I love, doing work that I have done for 40 years or work that has come out of work I have long done, work that brings me so much joy I look forward to getting up in the morning to do it. I have not felt this kind of joy and happiness in a very long time.

I will continue to blog daily, as I said, and The Sunday Night Writing Group is something I plan on continuing indefinitely. As long as I am able to do it I will continue. It is work of my heart, soul, and spirit and offering it for free on a donation basis only is an act of service that it is important for me to do. Registration is currently closed but if you are interested you can contact me to get on a waiting list for it. (Write to me at: thesundaynightwritinggroup@gmail.com to get on the waiting list.) I will only occasionally open it to new members because class size is limited and it is disruptive to have new members popping in all the time. The work we do is very deep, it is a serious commitment for those involved, and the work we are doing together is something really special. I am very proud of this work and it is becoming the ground for much else that I will be doing.

I cannot recommend more highly undertaking a 365 day blogging journey. It is a lot of work, but it will change your life. The gifts are immeasurable. In fact how to do this and what it means is one of the eCourses I am designing to introduce some time in the next couple of years.

Onward and upward and away I go. I have begun.