A few words about this “challenge“. At the end of December, the Guardian published this article called “Feed your soul: the 31-day literary diet for January”. The idea behind this, and I will quote the author of the article, Claire Armitstead, is as follows: “Our revels now are ended and January looms, with its exhortations to get fit, lose weight, dry out. So here’s a radical alternative diet: instead of depriving yourself, how about making it a month of treats – but feeding your brain instead of your face ?” She offered this: “Our one-a-day calendar will take you into magical realms of poetry and prose, argument and imagination. It will transport you to some places you always wanted to explore but couldn’t find the time, and to others you never knew existed where you will find strange and wonderful things.”
Nobody seemed bothered about Christmas this year. Some friends and lovers had disappeared, I didn’t get an Advent Calendar. So I was happy, at the same time as doing Dry January and Veganuary, to feed my soul that was screaming to be nourished by something else than recurrent obsessional thoughts. I scrupulously followed this calendar, day by day, with some days quite time-consuming. But it was an incredible experience. I discovered so many things, so many places to keep my mind occupied and “feed my soul”.
My highlights ? George Saunders’s speech on kindness, the lecture by Alice Oswald on water, and the podcast “What I love” with Kae Tempest. But this is really to point out a few because everything was a discovery, a gift to my inner self.
Thank you so much for these experiences.