Sunday Journal Prompt

“Change your thoughts and you change your world.”

– Norman Vincent Peale, author and minister

While at my nephew’s basketball game at an elementary school, I discovered positive messages posted on the outside of the girls’ bathroom stall doors, messages like “What makes you different makes you beautiful” and “Kindness is power.” 

I thought of times in which I’d shed tears in the girls’ bathrooms of my childhood, hurt by something someone had said to me. Messages on those walls certainly didn’t lift me up. If, as author and minister Norman Vincent Peale says, changing our thoughts can change our world, exposing ourselves to thought-shifting elements like these phrases can transform our outlook.

How might you change your thoughts and thus change your world?

 

 

 

Sunday Journal Prompt

“Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned.”

– Carl Sandburg, poet

This week my fashion-loving 10-year-old niece and I went to a Todd Oldham fashion exhibit at our local arts center—an outing planned for two months. While the galleries had impressive displays and we had fun chatting about the different styles, she was far more engaged by the “secret staircases” that linked one room to another.

As other museum goers took the main entryways into each space, we darted up and down these near-hidden passages a good part of our time there. It was this unexpected discovery that added magic to our adventure.

What unexpected discovery has enriched your life? How can you stay open to unplanned possibilities?

 

 

 

 

Sunday Journal Prompt

“Just give it a try and see what happens.”

– Gary Gilbert, screenwriter and InsideOUT Writers teacher, to incarcerated youth to encourage them to write about their life situation

 

Run by Hollywood screenwriters, the InsideOUT program teaches formerly and presently incarcerated youth how to write as a way to deal with their life situation. 

A quiet 15-year-old girl whose parents and brother had died due to violence in her world, told teacher Gary Gilbert, “I’m not a writer” and said she didn’t know where to begin. He encouraged her to give it a try to see what happens, and she wrote, “There’s a bullet where my heart used to be,” a first line that helped her write about her trauma.

Not all of his students are poets like she is, but it’s not about that. The idea is to let people know it’s safe to look inside and see what they find. As Gilbert says, “It’s about them seeing who they are, how they got there, and, if we do our job, about who they can become.”

 

What do you resist writing about? What might happen if you gave it a try?