Let's reflect - January

Welcome to you all.

So here we are, at the start of the Let's reflect challenge. We will be together for 12 weeks, the 2nd of each month. Wow !

I called my challenge let's reflect, because sometimes life gets in our way, doesn't go at all in the direction we wanted and we can feel hopeless and disoriented. I have been in this situation several times and to be honest I am in it right now, preparing my post in advance. A good way to go through these difficult times we all experience is to look inside and also to concentrate on others as learning from loved ones, even from strangers is also learning about ourselves.

As you know our discovery will be based on 12 words, each one starting with a letter from SILVER LINING.

Today's word is Serendipity. I absolutely love this word. If you never heard it before, it means

the act of finding something valuable or delightful when you are not looking for it

In simple words, it's taking joy out of something that you didn't expect.  

It 's a stranger smiling at you and making your day. 
It's your granddaughter saying " you look beautiful today ".
It's a letter from an old friend you had lost contact with.
It's a song that brings back some beautiful memories.
It's a smell that makes you hungry when you weren't.

During this week, we will concentrate on the little things life brings, these little things that we sometimes are too busy to see. It is a good exercise to look for these moments during this coming week but you also can use moments having happened before and come back and add moments that will happen in the future. Remember, we are building a " Silver Lining book " for difficult times. Anything that can help you, can go inside.

You are doing this challenge for yourself, so whatever your serendipity examples will be this week or earlier, they are yours. We are all different, so if your examples only make sense to you and nobody else, that's OK. If you want to only share some with us and leave the others hidden, that's OK. If you want to explain a lot or just a little, that's OK. What is important is what you are doing for yourself.

The way you choose to do this challenge is also up to you. You can take pictures, you can write, you can make a scrapbook page, you can art journal it, you can draw, you can share about a book that brightened your life, whatever you feel like doing will be the right thing to do.
When I had my accident downstairs in August 2011, I went from strong person to hopeless and scared person and I had a very difficult time coping with that. One day I watched the movie Burlesque on TV, I heard a song by Cher "You haven't seen the last of me" . I printed the lyrics and pinned them down on a shelf in front of me. I am fine now but I kept these words as they still are an inspiration to me. Many things come our way, we just need an open mind.

You might want to use different ways with the different words we will have along this year, depending on how they are talking to you. As long as you can keep all your pages together so you can go back whenever you want, any way will be good.

What I have in mind to use myself is this :

The 2 covers (mount board) are a bit more than 10" by 7.5" and the pages ( kind of thick drawing/painting paper ca 150gsm) are 10" by 7".  I then punched them with my Cinch. It will accept paints, promarkers, normal journaling pens and I still can stick some pictures, so I should be able to do whatever I fancy on it.

You might want to work on separate pages and only bind them at the end of the year, so you keep open the option of adding later more experiences to some words, but that is up to you.

If you decide to make a kind of book, you might want to decorate the cover and write a short introduction page. I started thinking about that but because I don't know exactly where the challenge will bring me, I decided to wait a bit and see.

Knowing that next Monday will be time for the next challenge (hosted by Kathi), it gives you a week for this one but there isn't any dead line at all. The last thing we need here is stress !

Believe it or not, it's not because I chose the word that my task will be any easier this week so I certainly will be playing along with you.

I didn't include any finished examples, firstly because I don't have any, and also because this is a personal thing that must talk to us and I am sure we all will come up with very different ideas, certainly learning a lot from each other.

Last but not least, your real challenge with this first word is to try and find at least 2 new nice things happening to you during this week. If like me you mainly work from home, do not worry, nice unexpected things happen even when we are alone : A phone call, a sound, a ring at the door, something you see on TV or hear on the radio, something you lost and find again, an email you receive ... 
If you work out of home, you might want to take a small notepad with you to jot down what happens.

At the end of the day, the challenge is not to find the event, the challenge is to have an open heart to recognize it.

Remember, this is not a competition. Even if all your events happened in the past, it's fine.

It's a different type of challenge and if you ask yourself how on earth I came up with this, well I am asking myself the same question, LOL, but I hope you will enjoy it.  

You can pop in at any time to comment/chat/ask questions ( I won't be far ) or to link to your blog and show some of your examples.

I can't wait to see what you would like to share. xxx