I started kikki K’s A Sentence a Day journal on August 1, 2013. There have been several versions since I got mine but the basic concept remains similar.
The idea is that for three years you respond to a sentence a day and once complete you look back at how your answers have changed over time, pausing to reflect on your thoughts, feelings and experiences.
Well, it’s now 2016 and I’ve finished the journal. *Applause*
I’m a sucker for anything kikki K produces, I love it all, so when I spotted the journal (all those years ago) I was keen to give it a go. At first I was very diligent, I even waited until the beginning of August so that the journal would read quite neatly (I had considered waiting til the start of 2014 but thought that that was going too far).
For a couple of months I did pull the journal out once a day; sometimes before bed, sometimes before work. I was doing well for a while there. Then I slipped, I’d forget and a few days would go by so I started responding to a few days at a time. And then it became a weekend ritual looking back over the week. But then I REALLY slipped up and ended up filling out a month’s worth of responses at a time.
During these monthly updates, I would put a lot of effort into disguising that I actually hadn’t been doing the exercise daily. In attempt to pull the wool over my own future self’s eyes, I would refer back to my phone calendar and enter day specific information. Questions such as ‘What are you most looking forward to tomorrow?’ became guesses of how I had thought in the past about a date that had already gone by.
I tried not to look at the entries from previous years until I’d entered that year’s answer – this was an aspect that I found interesting. Sometimes my answers were the same and sometimes they were very different. On some occasions my memory was jogged when I couldn’t recall who or what I was referencing in previous answers.
So apart from slipping up and completing the exercise in monthly batches, I did find the experience pleasant. However, I am relieved that it’s over and I have no intention of committing to the latest version of the journal – for me it’s definitely a one time event.
Have you undergone such a commitment? What did you think?
