This week, to attain, maintain or regain my sense of wellbeing...
I will try experimenting with new ways of describing things. This might help me be able to express myself when I find I want to talk to someone else. But for this week, I'm just going to do it for myself. Once a day, maybe at lunch or before bed, I'll sit down and do a word-play exercise.
In one column I will write a list of words that are nouns that I have seen, heard or felt today (names of things e.g. sadness, tree, people, day). Beside it, I will make a second column of words that are verbs (action/doing words, e.g. walks, dip, stumble, fall). Then I will mix the two colums together with joining words ('like', 'and', 'of', 'but') to make new descriptions of things. Finally, if I want, I will put them all together into a poem.
For example, using the words above...
Sadness walks
like trees dip
and people stumble
but only
the day
falls over
the edge
~ ~ ~
I could do this with as many or as few words as I want. The point is to spend a bit of time playing around with expression each day.
Once I am a bit used to playing around with words, I will add the 'New Descriptions Exercise' to my Personal Coping Kete as a way of distracting myself from the present and expressing myself in moments of stress and distress. This way I can stop chasing my distressing thoughts and turn my attention to the simple task of listing words and turning them into whatever I can. It might even help me find new ways of looking at things as I go.
