I have been thinking this past few weeks about habits…and how difficult it really is, or isn’t, to adopt new habits in our lives. I was thinking about it because I realized there are 3 new habits I have started and been continuing – and it brings me great hope that I can still change and learn and adapt in other areas of my life, as well…

As a result of thinking about these, we used this as an icebreaker question for our house church yesterday: What is a habit that you have recently started incorporating into your life?

There were some great answers – and EVERYONE had one. I’ll give you some of their answers first, and then share my 3 recent ones:

–Praying before I got to sleep at night (from a 12 year old!)
–Doing training exercises (ten each of squats, pullups, etc.) as well as drinking ginger tea every day
–Playing the guitar
–Hugging my daughter each morning as she leaves for school and eating yoghurt every morning
–Studying another language on our DS – portable gameboy (this was Eric’s – he’s been working on Japanese kanji!)
–Writing in a journal
–Drinking carrot juice every morning and drinking ginger tea three times a day instead of coffee (ginger tea was definitely a theme)…
–Doing kids devotions each day (from another 12 year old).

My 3 habits from recent months:
–I’ve been keeping a Ten-year journal for the past year or so- writing three lines every night before I go to bed… I hadn’t consistently journaled in many years- but it’s easy enough to write three lines… It’s been fun now that a year has passed since I began to read what I had written a year ago- i can imagine how much fun it will be in five or seven or nine years from now!
–I’ve finally figured out a good laundry system. Laundry is the bane of my existence, it has seemed, and it’s never under control. I’ve started doing a load of wash every night just before going to bed… when I wake up, I take down the previous day’s laundry (it needs to hang in our living room to dry overnight) – and then I hang up the new day’s wash. It’s working- and I don’t hate it as much!
–Keeping only one page of emails in my inbox… Several weeks ago I set aside a good number of hours to clean out my inbox -and I went through and filed or deleted over 4000 emails! Now, I only “let myself” keep up to one page of emails in there.

I get discouraged sometimes about the ways that I don’t change…so it’s been encouraging to think about and reflect with our community about how even more mature dogs 🙂 can still learn some new tricks….

Any new habits you want to share?