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You Can’t Force Celebration

Reflecting on habit #30 in my journey

Mary DeVries
2 min readMay 30, 2021
Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay

Today I am celebrating the end of my thirty days of new daily habits adventure. I’ve been at this for two full months now. In April I added a new habit every day. In May I’ve been evaluating each one as it reached the 30-day mark and deciding whether to keep it long term.

My final habit was to find something to celebrate each day. During the course of these 30 days, I’ve celebrated big things like my birthday, my daughter’s college graduation, and hugging my mom for the first time in forever. I’ve also celebrated small things like a perfect sunset, a delicious meal, and a good hair day.

I like looking for reasons to celebrate, but I’ve decided not to keep this as an ongoing daily habit. Choosing something every day felt forced and cheapened the experience for me. I’d like celebration to be more about a way of approaching life than a daily check box.

This means — drumroll please — the final tally of habits I intend to continue is 20 out of 30.

I’m proud of this result. Twenty new habits established bringing positive daily change into my life is a big accomplishment. Plus most of the habits I discarded are attitude changes I am continuing anyway just without a daily checkmark obligation.

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Mary DeVries
Mary DeVries

Written by Mary DeVries

I delight, despair and write about a life lived around the world. Fueled by Yorkshire Gold tea.

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