Welcome to negative capability, a weekly journaling prompt intended to encourage deliberate thinking in order to cultivate joy, emailed every Sunday. These prompts are meant for my 절친 only,but I am making them available for all my subscribers during the month of January, a time when we are most often reflecting on our past selves and what we want for the coming year. If you find these prompts useful or inspiring, why not consider subscribing?
As the old year dies, so too does that which you wish to let go. What do you want to leave in the past? What steps will you take to move forward? And what lessons will you carry with you?
When I was nine years old, my school took us on an overnight trip to the Sierra Nevadas, near Lake Tahoe during early March. To this day I can’t really remember what the purpose of this trip was, but what I do remember is that afterwards, my best friend at the time brought me and a few others to her family cabin in Truckee for a few extra days, where we ran wild through the woods and snow, chasing baby gartner snakes until I fell into a drift so deep I thought I was going to drown in snow. (I was a very short kid.) I did not drown, but what I remember more than anything is the child-shaped tunnel my body left behind as I fell away, of the top filling in with newer snow, and how the traces of the path I made could be so easily obliterated given enough time.
I’m not someone who suffers overmuch (if at all) from anxiety; I’m not the sort of person who ruminates over what might have been or what I could have done better. In many ways I am not a very self-reflective person, but perhaps that is because I know how easily the traces of the past can be obliterated. I can easily let go; it is holding on that I find harder to do. Even now I’m forgetting what it was I wanted to leave behind.
But if I were to pick an answer, I would like to leave my distractedness behind. My focus is terrible on the best of days, and I know what concrete step I am taking to move forward: remove social media from my life, except as it pertains to business needs. That new Instastory from Namjoon can wait, mostly because I know ARMY Twitter memorialize it later.
Drifts
Drifts
Drifts
🗣️ Listen to a voice recording of this prompt.
Welcome to negative capability, a weekly journaling prompt intended to encourage deliberate thinking in order to cultivate joy, emailed every Sunday. These prompts are meant for my 절친 only, but I am making them available for all my subscribers during the month of January, a time when we are most often reflecting on our past selves and what we want for the coming year. If you find these prompts useful or inspiring, why not consider subscribing?
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As the old year dies, so too does that which you wish to let go. What do you want to leave in the past? What steps will you take to move forward? And what lessons will you carry with you?
When I was nine years old, my school took us on an overnight trip to the Sierra Nevadas, near Lake Tahoe during early March. To this day I can’t really remember what the purpose of this trip was, but what I do remember is that afterwards, my best friend at the time brought me and a few others to her family cabin in Truckee for a few extra days, where we ran wild through the woods and snow, chasing baby gartner snakes until I fell into a drift so deep I thought I was going to drown in snow. (I was a very short kid.) I did not drown, but what I remember more than anything is the child-shaped tunnel my body left behind as I fell away, of the top filling in with newer snow, and how the traces of the path I made could be so easily obliterated given enough time.
I’m not someone who suffers overmuch (if at all) from anxiety; I’m not the sort of person who ruminates over what might have been or what I could have done better. In many ways I am not a very self-reflective person, but perhaps that is because I know how easily the traces of the past can be obliterated. I can easily let go; it is holding on that I find harder to do. Even now I’m forgetting what it was I wanted to leave behind.
But if I were to pick an answer, I would like to leave my distractedness behind. My focus is terrible on the best of days, and I know what concrete step I am taking to move forward: remove social media from my life, except as it pertains to business needs. That new Instastory from Namjoon can wait, mostly because I know ARMY Twitter memorialize it later.