A Chic Paris Lockdown – Part 2: Day 29 – To Thine Own Self Be True…
December 1, 2020
Day 29 is “Be different to everyone else” in Fiona Ferris’s book, 30 Chic Days At Home. Fiona suggests that we step aside from the news and talk shows and popular culture for a moment (only a moment! No one-way ticket to a deserted island without internet access required for this exercise.) In this moment, Fiona encourages us to choose a more positive (and interesting) way to engage with the world around us by focusing on something other than CoVid-19 and the difficult circumstances of 2020. She gives us several other things that we could use for our thoughts and our conversations – things like what books are we reading, what new thing are we learning or what changes are we making in your every day and how are they working?
When I first read the title of Day 29, my mind went off in a related but slightly different direction. In a way, the idea “to be different to everyone else” asks us to step outside of the routine and hub-bub of everyday life for a moment and think about how we want to experience each of our days. I would surmise that if you like Fiona’s books and are enjoying this blog, you are probably someone who does not want to unthinkingly follow the crowd on auto-pilot through the years of your life – only to wake up at the end of it and wonder “who am I really?” and “how did I truly want to live?”
Fiona suggests in this day (and in all of her books) that it’s more fun to forge our own path in how we talk, act and live our daily lives. The benefit of examining what we like and what lights us up inside is that we are able to consciously incorporate these thoughts and actions into our every day. None of us are living on the above-mention deserted, internet-free island. Our lives and days are intertwined with others. Our thoughts, our conversation, and our habits, however, are ours alone and we can point them in directions that bring us greater happiness and joy.
I like the idea of the website “opt-out” button which we can click and we won’t be bothered by auto-generated emails/promotions. I would like to click “opt-out” on certain things I do in my life and click “opt-in” on more positive thoughts and actions. Fiona gives us a few examples of more positively focused topics that we can use as our “opt-in” selections. (Writer Cait Flanders gave me the analogy of the “opt out” button as a life tool in her very thought-provoking book, Adventures in Opting Out, A Guide to Taking the Road Less Traveled.)
Fiona, together with Cait, has provided a useful mental model – what otther fun, positive ways of thinkng and living can I “opt-in” to using?
