When it comes to this idea of creating your life, making it art, using your life as some kind of design, making it into some kind of art, one of the tools that I really like to use is the calendar.
A calendar takes days and sort of designs them and arranges them into some kind of a overall pattern.
So you look at each day: each day is a day.
It doesn’t even have to have any kind of name.
Sometimes I like to remind of myself that.
You know, it feels like oh, it’s another drab Wednesday: well, it really could be any day.
There’s no built-in Wednesday-ness about any particular day.
But just by giving it a different name, like we have a different feeling when a day is like a Saturday or a Sunday versus like a Thursday or something.
So giving a name to the day somehow brings out a certain feeling.
So that’s with the weekdays, and same with the months, the feeling of what month we’re in.
Now, weekday maybe feels completely arbitrary, because that cycle could just be anything.
We go with seven days, but you can use any kind of cycle you want, and that just gives automatic names over and over again.
And with months, that’s when it kind of gets into the seasons.
So here we get one of the biggest defining factors for a calendar, is the seasonal cycle.
We have the seasons of the year.
And our calendar can really bring out the feeling of the different seasons.
So of course we have the months.
We have solstices, equinoxes, so we can track the movement of the seasons.
But I like the idea of creating a custom calendar and really adding anything to it.
So when it comes to the seasons, whatever is local to your area that makes the seasons.
Besides this globally shared, you know, solstice, equinox, that’s very easily easy to calculate, there’s also all the seasonal effects that happen every year.
So for example, here, there would be the time in the spring when there’s the leaf out, when the leaves return to the trees, and that’s a big transition in the spring.
And then of course in the fall, when the leaves change colour and then fall off: that is a part of the seasonal cycle.
Whenever the first snowfall is, part of the seasonal cycle.
So imagine having those as part of a calendar.
Now we can’t predict those exactly in advance, but we sort of have them as something that we mark as part of the progress of the year.
And so we have so much ability to customize the way we look at a calendar.
It’s not just some kind of built-in we have weekday names, we have month names, and we have numbers.
That’s when it comes to practical purposes.
And you make an appointment, OK you can just use month and day.
You don’t need to say “I will meet you after the leaves fall.” That won’t be very practical.
But for creating this- this custom calendar can really bring out the feeling of different parts of the year.
And we can each create our own cycle.
Besides all the seasonal factors, we can also bring in: imagine having the birthdays of everybody that you’re close to being part of your personal calendar.
Because those birthdays: it’s like everybody has a completely different pattern of birthdays where it’s almost like a whole holiday system.
the birthdays of those close to us that we celebrate: they become defined times in the year and that sort of makes its own calendar so we can really have a personalized calendar if we imagine going through all those birthdays as if it’s some kind of a holiday cycle.
So along with whatever religious holidays we might have, whatever civic, national, local holidays, official government holidays, there might be throughout the year, we also have birthdays, that create this kind of feeling where there’s something special about many different days.
And that’s one of the things that I like about this idea, is that it makes more days have some kind of special character to them.
Instead of just being, you know, a month name and a number, or maybe like one of the weekday names, you have this whole kind of- there’s something special.
If it’s a special day, it’s like a day that has its name.
Like Christmas Day, New Year’s Day, or like such-and-such birthday.
That can become its own kind of special day, that we can do this for many days throughout the year.
Same with anything where there’s like any kind of annual event.
[…] Sports schedules can be used to kind of create a seasonal pattern of the year, so that if there’s playoffs or finals in a sport that you’re following, that also becomes part of the holiday cycle.
So what else could we include to make our personal calendar, besides the seasonal changes, birthdays, annual events that are scheduled? What can we do to make every part of the year have its own special feeling, so that as we go through the year, we can really feel this customized cycle of the year in a way that really feels meaningful?
#calendar #personalcalendar #yourholiday