Daily practice is a part of many religions and spiritual quests. But the discipline of daily practices doesn’t have to have anything to do with religion or spirituality. The self-discipline of having a daily practice is good for the mind, body, and soul.
My writing online is a daily practice that is spread around in a number of places. It is the best thing I have done in my life to improve my writing. I have tried daily writing practices before. William Stafford and other poets are known for their daily poems. I have tried that short-term – a poem a day for a month, for example. It helps that Stafford when asked about how he could write a poem each day, he replied that he lowered his standards. He didn’t write a gem every day. But he did write every day.
Maybe your practice is yoga, meditation, working in the garden, painting, a time set aside for serious reading. The list of possibilities is long.
One daily practice that I came across this past week is taking a daily photo.
The idea comes from Lisa Bettany, a professional photographer (an iPhone developer and TV & Web personality) based in San Francisco. She references the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in a field. She translates that for photography to about 100 pictures a day for about 5 years.
That sounds like quite a journey, but if it’s something you like to do, it will be a welcome journey.
So, she is encouraging everyone to shoot and share one photo a day for 365 days. To help you with the challenge, she created Mostly365.com where you share your daily photos with the world with one tweet.
It’s something you can do with that fancy DSLR, or your cell phone camera, or whatever camera you have. Then you post it online (look at her suggested list of sites for that below – they will all work for her site) and then tweet it using the hashtag #mostly365.
It is doable. It is discipline. I wrote about a friend of mine, John LeMasney, who did a daily digital sketch project last year. That was a lot tougher. But, as much as I like to take photos, to do it daily AND post it online AND be satisfied that it was “worth posting” is not as easy as it may sound.
Are you up for the photo challenge? Are you up for the challenge of any daily practice? I’m going to give it a try.
“Discipline” has a bad bad reputation. It makes you think of school and getting sent to the principal’s office for detention. But discipline is good and necessary.
Lisa’s suggested photo-sharing sites:
Lisa’s portfolio is at http://lisabettany.com
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