Day 31: The Everyday Intensity Manifesto

Welcome to Day 31 of the July Intensity Project!

31 Days Toward Living with More Intensity & Creativity

We made it! Thirty-one days. Thirty-one ways to think about living with intensity and creativity.

Thank you to everyone who stopped by, whether once or regularly, especially all of you who left a comment and joined in the conversation. I hope you learned as much as I learned from all of you (and I made some new online friends in the process!). You can always catch up on the series here, and I will post a sidebar link to the series soon.

The July Intensity Project was born in London as I was re-reading Kazimierz Dabrowski’s book Personality-shaping Through Positive Disintegration. On nearly every page, I realized that his ideas and theories and examples have much to teach us about knowing and creating ourselves day after day, especially in today’s busy and quickly changing world.

To sum up the series, I will leave you with an Everyday Intensity Manifesto, inspired by the Creative Manifesto of E. Paul Torrance. For the next few weeks I will probably post here two or three times a week instead of daily. However, I will post daily on my author’s blog, The Wild Thyme Unseen, where I am participating in an August Ultimate Blog Challenge. Please join me there!

The Everyday Intensity Manifesto

1. Allow yourself to imagine, befriend, and enjoy your best, favorite, and true self, the personality you are developing day by day.

2. Make your interests and passions a high priority in your life, regardless of whether they are practical, popular, or lead to worldly gain.

3. Embrace your intensities and excitable nature—whether intellectual, emotional, physical, sensual, or of the imagination—as not just a good thing, but as the source of wonderful potential for personal joy and growth.

4. Reframe negative labels for yourself and others (e.g., weird, strange, high-strung) in more positive or endearing ways (unique, intense, having the discombobulation gene). Be especially aware of negative self-talk you use to refer to your own intensities, and begin to talk to yourself as you would to a good friend.

5. Resist the urge to ignore or run from painful and intense feelings. Sit with them. Name them. Write about them. Know you can withstand them.

6. Create time and space for “isolation in peaceful conditions,” especially when your emotions are high or you need some interruption from everyday life.

7. Learn from the informal advisers and mentors in your life who are further on the journey toward being who they are meant and want to be. Thank them.

8. Notice, savor, and be thankful for the “euphoric rush of everyday life.”

9. Congratulate yourself for successes big and small every day, especially the ones that no one else sees. Remind yourself of your best qualities and what you do well.

10. Know every day that you deserve good things and a good life.

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