Last week, I wrote about re-establishing a practice of morning pages. Another essential practice from that period of my life which I have now resurrected is that of ‘artist dates‘. I always thought of artist dates as simply being nice to myself and eventually they morphed into the concept of ‘small joys’, partly because I have pretty much always had a low income, but also because small joys are something nice you do for yourself every day. For me that means always wearing a cool pair of socks and eating nice food.
That said, I have decided to do slightly grander gestures for myself on a monthly basis. I suspect this will mainly involve either going to the seaside or going into the woods, both of which I have done recently, hence the pretty pictures in this post. I suppose the point of this post is simply: why do we not do things like this more often? Why do I, for one, need to turn going out into nature into some kind of ritual in order to entice myself to do it?