Challenge #8: Organized and Diorganized

Contemporary life is hectic, and keeping up with the household chores, the responsibilities of work, the emails, the social networks, the text messages, and the phone calls can quickly bury you under a pile of to-dos and must-dos. Take time to reflect on the organization of your life. Think about everything from your mundane, daily routines to you big, special hopes and dreams.

How do you get things done? In what ways do you keep yourself organized (or even disorganized) physically, socially, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually? What routines and rituals do you use in your daily life to make certain that everything that needs to get done does get done? How do you tackle your daily tasks and plan for those rare and special occasions? When do you throw your plans out the window, and when do you stick steadfast to them?

Reflect on one specific aspect or think about it all in general terms.

As always make certain to leave a link to your response in the comments, and remember that it’s ok to show a work in progress or to simple post a written response.

Challenge #7: Chaos and Order

Life can come fast at times creating a lot of action, turmoil, upheaval, and chaos. The to-do list gets long, and there doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day. For some people, the day is scheduled, compartmentalized, and structured. For others, the day is spontaneous, freeform, and perhaps tumbled together.

How do you deal with order and chaos in your life? Are you structured or spontaneous? Are you balanced somewhere in between the extremes? How do you react when things do not go according to plan? How does it feel when things go just as planned?

Reflect on your tolerance for chaos and your threshold for order, and create a response that echoes the role that each plays in your life. Do you make order out of chaos or chaos from order?

Don’t forget to share a link to your response in the comments.

Challenge #6: Operative Words

Operative words are the essential words in a sentence, story, poem or script. Performers and spoken word poets often stress or emphasize these words in some way when performing.

We often look for operative words in our writing and highlight or visually emphasize them so they stand out. That way we can come back later and quickly find and use these words as sources for further investigation and exploration.

Look over some writing that you have done. If you don’t have any, take about 10 minutes to do some writing – perhaps use a random word as a prompt or perhaps something a bit more meaningful. Look over your writing and chose important words or phrases and highlight them in some way. These are words and phrases that you are drawn to so trust your gut reaction. Circle them. Make them bold. Use a different color. Try to find at least three operative words or phrases in your writing, but feel free to find as many as you’d like.

Pick one of these words or phrases to use as a source of inspiration.

Don’t to forget to post a link to you response in the comments even if you don’t get it finished.

Challenge #5: Random Words

Part of our approach at times is to let randomness and happenstance to enter our process. Open yourself to chance by picking a random word to use as a source of inspiration.

Grab a book or dictionary that you have close at hand, and open to a random page and point to a random word. Don’t like that word? Pick another. Not ready to be completely random? Pick a random page, and choose a word to which you are drawn.

Just don’t do this repeatedly in order to pick that word you already have in mind or one that fits your mode of thinking. Let chance take you in a direction that you are not ready to go. If you find the word challenging, let it challenge you and see if you can respond to that word even if it’s the silliest most unusual word.