Today is Time to Talk day, a day when we talk about our mental health and support each other. For some reason I also thought it was National Kindness Day (it’s actually 17th Feb). However yesterday on the Action for Happiness calendar the instruction was to thank someone and tell them how they made a difference for you.
This blog fits all that in and is also the key thing for my gratitude this week.
I’ve posted about craft club before. One of my goals for 2019 is to make new things, create new things and learn new things – if all at once even better. Today in craft club I learnt how to zentangle. I haven’t really done much art since school and while I say I can’t draw it’s actually that I haven’t really done any drawing. Zentangle is the art of being zen and tangling which is basically fancy doodles.
One of the crafters told me in the first session they ran everyone was their usually noisy chatty selves to start, then slowly the noise levels reduced to nothing. All she could hear was people’s breathing and then she noticed everyone started breathing in sync. How wonderful is that! And it happened again today. I forgot all about work and what was going on in the world and for half an hour it was just me, a fine ink pen and my doodles.
We crafted onto a heart shaped card which we then made into a Valentine’s card but you can do it on anything. After the session my colleague sent me an email receipt for my annual membership fee and said she was looking forward to us doing more crafts. Not just because it’s a kindness I sent a reply telling her just what I had got out of joining and how much it is beginning to mean to me. She really appreciated it (and asked if she could use my comments for the newsletter – an added nice side effect).
It felt good to actually just message someone and say thank you. How often do we pay compliments? So today, I was both kind in words to them but kind to myself by taking an hour out of the day to just focus on myself and do something fun.