A part of me wishes I had created some grand plan for discovering my charming life, but for once, I didn’t want to follow any rules or guidelines. I just want to see what happens when I look for more ways to bring enchantment into my life.

That doesn’t mean that I think everything should be all sparkly and happy all the time.  It means that I want to be present in my life, making conscious choices about what makes me happy, and feels right to my authentic self. Color is a big part of that for me, as you know from my Pink post.

But now I’m focusing on other things, too. Deeper things that I’ll be sharing throughout the year, when the time is right.  I’m taking a class called “A Year To Live” . The premise of A Year To Live is to imagine you had only a year to live. What would you want to feel and do? These are the things that we should be cultivating in our lives anyway. Yet many of us don’t. It sounds so simple, and maybe it is for others, but I’ve already learned so much in this course, tapped into parts of my buried deeply and I’ve begun exercising some of the small lessons in my daily life.

Between A Year To Live and Debora Geary’s Witches Under Way , I’ve also decided that what my charming life needs is more frivolity and play.  Not so many rules. Doing something because it’s fun and because it connects me with a part of myself I may have forgotten about.  Sometimes, it’s hard to play when you’re a grown up and have Responsibilities and Bills and a Job and Obligations.  So you have to look for opportunities to have these little frivolous moments.

Yesterday, I painted my toenails all different colors. Silly? Yes. Simple? Yes. But this little thing makes me happy when I see my feet.  I like it. I think I’ll keep my toes this way for a while.  It’s nothing groundbreaking, but I am really beginning to see how little things can make a difference in how I approach not only my day, but also my life.

I won a copy of Stop and Blog The Roses, a daily gratitude journal for 2012.   It seems so easy to write down three things each day that you are grateful for.  Go ahead. Try it.  Once you hit the “hierarchy of needs” items like a home, a job,  food, friends and family, it gets a little tougher.  Not because I don’t have a lot to be grateful for, but because I get so bogged down in the mechanics of every day, it’s sometimes hard to see ordinary things that are still worthy of gratitude. Like the wonderful neighbors I have. I’m not grateful for them because of some catastrophe they helped me avert. I’m grateful for them because an unseasonably warm Saturday evening in February became hours of laughter and conversation while we were enjoying the unexpected weather.  Or being grateful for the music I take for granted, that can affect my soul and change my mood. It’s always at my fingertips, but until I thought about it, I wasn’t actually grateful for it.

Not recognizing the magic in the mundane is a large part of what started me on this journey. I want to experience my life- feel it, embrace it, love it, live it- and not just sit by and let it happen to me.