Poetry Challenge #226-The Think System
How about those New Year Resolutions? Did you make them? Have you kept them so far? Gulp…
According to Discover Happy Habits poll of folks who make New Year’s resolutions:
After 1 week 75% are still successful in keeping it.
After 2 weeks, the number drops to 71%.
After 1 month, the number drops again to 64%.
After 6 months, 46% of people who made a resolution are still successful in keeping it.
Notice, all those statistics are about making and keeping resolution. No one ever says we can’t revise them…
Poetry Challenge #226
The Think System
In The Music Man, Dr. Harold Hill taught the “The Think System” to folks in River City. “Think!” he implored his band students “think” the notes and to imagine themselves playing. The Think System kept Harold out of the Hoosegow. Maybe it can work for us, too.
Poetry Challenge #226
The Think System
Choose one thing you’d like to change in your life. One dream you have for yourself. One hope for the future. It might be that New Year’s Resolution you half-hardheartedly made, or maybe something you haven’t dared put into words.
“Think” of a time, a place, a reality where that change, that dream, that hope is a fait accompli. You are doing it! Living it! Being there!
Write THAT poem. Write a poem based in that new reality! Maybe this clearer image of then will help us refine and keep those resolutions now.
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, just do it!
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge 2000+ days ago. Now we take turns creating prompts to share with you. Our hope is that creatives—children & adults—will use our prompts as springboards to word play time. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
Click on Fishbowl link and sign up to receive email notifications from Kelly's blog (aka The Fishbowl):
All who subscribe, comment or share a poem will be entered in . . .
Poetry Challenge #224 Ticking Along
Tick-Tock. Tick-Tock The clock is ticking, running fast. Tick-Tock Tick-Tock…
Yesterday was National Tick Tock Day (Dec. 29th). In a matter of hours this year that has ticked by sooooooo quickly will be over . . .
Have you done everything you need to do before the end of the year? Do it just now…but first:
Poetry Challenge #224
The Clock’s Ticking
Tick Tock.
Tick
Tick Tick
TALK
Write a poem with one or two words on each line. Listen to the rhythm. Listen to the sounds. Does it sound like a wristwatch or a grandfather clock.
Set Your Timer for 7 Minutes
Start Writing!
Don’t Think About it, just do it!
For inspiration, here are 11 songs with Time in the Title. Maybe you can write one of your own!
The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face by Roberta Flack
Feels Like the First Time by Foreigner
Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper
I’ve Had the Time of My Life by David Cook
Time in a Bottle by Jim Croce
Love Me Two Times by The Doors
Any Time at All by the Beatles
Does Anybody Really Know What Time it is? by Chicago
Time is on my Side by The Rolling Stones
As Time Goes By sung by Jimmy Durante
Cindy Faughnan and I began this 7-Minute Poetry Challenge 2000+ days ago. Now we take turns creating prompts to share with you. Our hope is that creatives—children & adults—will use our prompts as springboards to word play time. If you join us in the Challenge, let us know by posting the title, a note, or if you want, the whole poem in the comments.
Click on Fishbowl link and sign up to receive email notifications from Kelly's blog (aka The Fishbowl):
All who subscribe, comment or share a poem will be entered in . . .
Don't Toss The Baby Out With the Bathwater!
I Googled these...what're Yours??
Happy 2017! It's a new dawn, a new day, a new calendar waiting to be filled with good intentions. Many of us--maybe you, definitely me--are making or have already made resolutions. Since one of mine (which I've already broken) is to be timely, you may already have your resolutions SET. IN. STONE.
If you're open to revision, get out your chisel and read on. If you, like me, having broken many year's worth of good Resolutions, haven't committed yet, read on.
A recent, informal survey revealed how most New Year's Resolutions are intended to break bad habits: Eat Better! Exercise More! Organize! Be More Loving! More Creative! BE More... Better...BETTER. . .
BETTER. BEST. That's what it's all about. Being "Better" or best, THE BEST. Before you go hog wild with the "Out with the old on with the new," while make this year's Resolutions, I'd like to inject one word of caution: BABY
“As in the adage ‘Don’t Toss The Baby Out With the Bathwater!’”
What the heck do babies and bathwater have to do with New Year's Resolutions? To answer that we'll need Mr. Peabody's to set his Time Capsule back to the 1500's.
Back then the term "running water" referred not to tap water, but to naturally running water, i.e. a river or stream. There were no spigots to fill a waiting tub. Instead buckets of water were lugged from a running water source, heated on a stove and then poured onto a tub. Then bathing commenced. Which ends, as you'll see in example #1, with Baby being the last one in the bathwater. At this point, there are two possible ways the baby could have been tossed:
1. Since lugging and heating bathwater was heavy, hard work, baths were infrequent and everyone in the family used the same water based on family rank: the man of the house had First Bath privileges, "followed by other sons and men, then the women and finally the children—last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it—hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water."-via mentalfloss.com
Yeah, if the "baby" is a catfish tossing it might be in order...
2. After bathing the baby, someone calls "Mother!" or "Woman!" or screams thus distracting Mom, so she tosses the tub of bathwater with the baby still inside.
Still wondering what baby bath water has to do with resolutions? Here's what:
Traditionally while making New Year's Resolution, we focus on the mucky bathwater and forget about our babies. (Thus New Year's Resolution time becomes "Beat The Crap Out Of Yourself Time".)
It's just past the holidays, the busiest time, the time following a long period of so much MERRY MAKING has totally trashed routine making it easy to think of a kazillion things we should resolve to do better.
WAIT! Before you go making that naughty list and checking it twice. Before you commit to any resolving what-so-ever. I challenge you to do yourself and everyone in your life a favor and make another list, FIRST.
On this First List, write down what you did RIGHT this past year. List everything RIGHT! . . . . OK Everything you DID. Every. Single. Thing. YOU ACCOMPLISHED.
Come on, Chick'n write the list!
THINGS I DID RIGHT LAST YEAR
1.
2.
3. I don't care how slovenly, lazy, messed up, OCD, ADD, RAP, MIA you might think you are, you did DO SOME THINGS right in 2016. (Assuming self-deprecation, I stopped at 3 in the example...This is your list, so LIST ON!)
Now--with this list of "babies" worth cuddling in plain sight--set your 2017 Resolutions. To be sure you don't throw your accomplishments out with the proverbial bathwater. Hug those babies! Embrace them. Celebrate them. If you're please with the way those things turned out. Put them on your new New Year's Resolution list FIRST! Because dang it, YOU DID GOOD!
2017 New Years's Resolution #1
Celebrate What You Did Right, First! and Do IT Again! Hooray Happy 2017!
Don't Toss the Baby Playlist:
- Something Good from Sound of Music
- Auld Lang Syne sung by Susan Boyle
- I Dreamed A Dream sung by Susan Boyle