Doing the exact same thing every day becomes very boring.  Get up, go to school, go home, watch TV, and go to bed day after day.  No wonder many people feel very little poetry in their lives.  A routine life rarely leads to poetic insight. 

By making each day and each action fresh, each moment of our lives becomes more poetic.  Break your routine by changing something as simple as walking a different path or changing the order that you put on your shoes.  Then break another step of your routine, however small it might seem.  As you gradually break your patterns of behaviour, observe sensations that come from your varied actions.  Keep a list of the routines you break and note if there is any significance to it.  Combine these observations into a poem. 

Each routine that you break should help you experience your life freshly.  After you collect several good examples, put your new sensations together into a poem.  You can give it a title such as “New Morning” or “Right Shoe First.”  The poem is intended to reveal new perspectives on old habits.

Eating Habits

Most people are terrible creatures of habit, especially when it comes to eating.  Some people eat the same food for lunch every day, or go to the same noodle shop every day for years.  This becomes very boring, and the food is eaten without any joy.  By bringing new flavours into your life, your meals become more poetic, and hopefully healthier at the same time.  Here are some suggestions to help break your eating habits and discover new variations in your food.  First, list 7 of your most common eating habits.  Then, one day at a time, change that habit.  At the end of one week, reflect on your changes.

Poetry requires close observation of the world, of self and also of our food.  As you change your diet, your perception of food should also change.  As you attempt to create a new self, new observations come into view.  After a week, see if you’ve discovered some new things that you like to eat.  Include some new spices and flavours in your poetry.

Travelling Poetry

Every day we spend time travelling to school, work or doing errands.  Most people probably take the same route every time without thinking too much about it.  As a result, we become blind and deaf to the environment around us because it becomes so ordinary.  To wake up the senses, experiment with a different way of getting to school or work.  Take a different form of transport and find a different route.  As you travel your new path, take note of things along the road that are new.  Look for interesting signs, strange smells, and colourful shops.  Consider yourself to be like Columbus or Vasco Da Gama as you find new paths to new places.

A different side of Town

Get a map of your city and identify places of which you’ve heard, but have never visited.  On your day off, go there without any real purpose.  Go just for experience.  Bring your poetry notebook with you and write observations of interesting sites and places.  Go to a district of your city or county with a different social class or ethnic background than your own.  Listen to the differences.  Smell and taste the unique flavours.  Observe the activities on the streets, the expressions on the faces and the look of the houses.  Talk to some of the locals if you can, or imagine their hopes and attitudes.  Write a poem about your experience that connects you with the people. 

A different side of Poetry

By making changes in your lifestyle, eating habits and travel routine, you discover new sights and sounds of the world.  Keep notes on changes within yourself, plus new awareness of the world around you. 

Every day of our lives is a new poem,

Waiting for us to experience it