Intrigued by her recent comment, I asked Catherine to elaborate about her “year of living more interestingly.” Here’s how she explained it…

Every year when I write my Christmas cards, I sit down with my calendar and look back over the year to see what I did that was newsworthy and interesting enough to tell friends about. A couple of years ago I started thinking my life was getting boring, and when I mentioned this to a friend, she agreed. A little too enthusiastically I thought, but fortunately for our friendship, she had a solution.

The year before, she had had one of those Big Birthdays (the ones that end in -0) and she’d decided she was going to live large for the whole year. She plotted a year full of activities had a grand time doing all kinds of things. This sounded like what I needed. Thus was born the Year of Living More Interestingly.

There were four simple rules for selecting activities:

1. You need 12 activities, one for each month. Some things may last longer than a month, some may take only a matter of hours, and a mix is useful. You can always drop things off the calendar if time gets tight, but better to start with one a month.
2. The activities should be taken from that list in your head of “One day I’m going to…” things that you have never yet done.
3. One of the activities should be something you are scared of trying. It doesn’t have to be death-defying, just something that makes you nervous to think about actually doing it.
4. One thing should be something you don’t think you will like but you are willing to try it anyway. For my friend it was golf, and she was right, she hated it, but now she knows for sure.

Having selected the activities, you use the annual calendar to plan out when they will take place. We used cheap DIY calendars, and we filled in the blank picture space with images cut out from magazines to illustrate the activity. Pictures are important because they stick in your mind, and tend to capture what it is you’re imagining the experience will be like. For example, if your activity is “go on a picnic” and you cut out pictures of elegant food & chilled wine spread under a shady tree near a sparkling river, don’t schedule your picnic for mid-winter.

The usefulness of the annual calendar is that the specifics of days & times (and even truth be told, months) on which the activity occur don’t really matter at this point. It is just important that each month has an activity. At some point you need to schedule the actual appointments in your regular calendar pages, but the annual calendar is important because it’s the big picture reminder of your goals for the year.

Here’s what my calendar contained (unfortunately I don’t have pictures of the actual calendar as I lost it during a house move):

January — join a gym
February — take a singing class [my Scary Activity... it's not a talent and I was terrified of doing it.]
March — learn patternmaking and sew something
April — start running
May — ride a long distance train [my Don't Think I'll Like It activity... I had a bad memory of an Amtrak experience.]
June — start a blog
July — take a holiday to Australia
August — have a wardrobe consultation
September — learn bookbinding
October — do a dance class
November — learn papermaking
December — buy a dress [because I didn't own any at the time]

So how did I do?
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