022: highlighting as an act of love
Two little additions to ongoing projects this week.
I've been struggling with my usual Routine Card, so I made a new one, and hopefully in the process designed something that felt more generous and kind to the imperfections of building a routine.
Then, we imagine being a highlighter.
I've been ignoring my Time + Paper Routine Cards recently. The gratifying daily stamp isn't enough to compel me to do yoga, or write, or whatever else I want to accomplish on a daily basis. I could take this time to re-evaluate my relationship to daily routines, these never-ending cycles of optimizing and refining. Or I can design a new routine card.
The Routine Tree Card is a template with 5 trees with branches that extend out to have 5 endpoints per tree. The idea is that each end corresponds to a day of the month (30 days total, an extra free day for months that end in 31). When you complete a daily task, you can fill out one of the ends of the branches, I'm using a dot marker to fill it in like flowers on a tree, but it can also work by just drawing something with a pen or pencil.
The idea is to create some abstraction from the regular Routine Card, which had an empty box for every day of the month. It just started feeling really bad when I missed a box. I would scramble to spend some time to write in sub-optimal conditions if it meant I could maintain a streak, or I would get discouraged over too many consecutive misses, and just end up not doing the task.
The hope is that since every five days has a tree, if you miss a day or two, the tree is still there, some branches do not have to bloom. And if you really miss a bunch, a new tree is there to fill out, instead of having to scrap the whole month.
Feel free to download and print for yourself!
What does it mean to look at our role of creating as similar to the role of a highlighter? What does it mean when the act of creating is not in charting unknown territory, not in drawing in a new direction, not in being mightier than the sword, but in highlighting? To highlight is to uplift, to amplify, to emphasize, to embrace, to support. And yes, to to highlight is an action of creation.
This tiny.site celebrates the act of highlighting, showing how highlighting can bring into visibility something that was not visible before, but was always there.