Curation + Inspiration

One of the great pleasures of the New Year for me is cracking open a fresh journal and flipping through the blank pages while imagining the stories, adventures, and yes, even the potential trials and tribulations, that I’ll be committing to ink in the days ahead.

Before our digital age, the watch keeper on ships would keep a slate tablet near the helm on which he recorded speeds, distances and headings on the voyage. If there were no problems, when the shifts changed, the new watch keeper would simply “wipe the slate clean” and start recording all over again.

For me, my new journal every year is a clean slate just waiting for the next chapter in my story to be written.

And since I believe that we are all co-writing the script that is our lives, I believe it’s important to spend some time thinking — and dreaming — about the stories we’d like our pages to contain.

Equally important, though, as I discovered during a coaching call last week, is deciding what to put to rest now that 2011 is past. To what and to whom have you been directing your energy and attention that no longer needs, warrants or deserves your energy moving forward?

Hmmm…I’ll let you stew on that one for a moment…

Completing this introspective process of examining and dreaming is just Step One of the Clean Slate Process that a New Year brings.

The vital step, Step Two, is to actually commit your resolutions, goals, priorities, or whatever you want to call them, to paper. Write’em down ladies and you stand a much greater chance of seeing’em happen!

This poster by Jessica Patterson gives you plenty of space to do just that and it also offers a helpful reminder in its small print:

Mistakes are important sometimes, and part of this “resolution,” by nature, includes learning from and improving upon lackluster efforts and failures (should they happen to happen).

You see, the good news is that you don’t have to wait for January 1 every year to start with a Clean Slate. If you find you’ve fallen off the Resolution Wagon in March, just dust yourself off and hop back on!

Every day of your life dawns fresh and new with the opportunity to always improve upon yesterday.

Every day you exercise your creative freedom to make the same or different choices.

Every day you choose to engage in habits and activities that support and enrich you or you choose to engage in habits and activities that don’t.

Every day you interact with people who lift you up or you interact with people who bring you down.

So if you’re gonna build up one muscle this year to really change your life, forget about your triceps or quads and focus all your concentration and effort on strenghtening your Choice muscle. It will have the greatest effect in every area of your life including health, relationships, business and even style.

And should you be interested in a Clean Slate for your closet, simply let go of all the dazzle, glitz and glam for a while and step back to a more organic, pure palette like the one offered by today’s VPOD, a simple khaki cotton dress.

It’s Clean Slate dressing for a Vintage Crusader!

Available at Ramona West.

(Image Credit: Jessica Patterson, Flickr | To receive the VPOD free via email with detailed size and price information, sign up for the growing email mailing list here. Your information will never be sold or shared and you can easily unsubscribe at any time.)