What are you doing with your thirty-seven days?

Alfred Adler said we should “Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.” What, if you did it consistently for thirty-seven days (and perhaps beyond), would create positive vibes, intentional joy, good karma, fantastic direction, and deep expansiveness in your life? What one thing could you do that would start you on the road to greater wholeness, to your real life? Can you do it for just thirty-seven days? Because, as writer Annie Dillard reminds us, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Perhaps it’s something simple like cleaning out one drawer every day in your house for thirty-seven days. Perhaps writing one Haiku every day for thirty-seven days would break old patterns and help you see more. Or eating five fruits and vegetables a day or writing for ten minutes each day or walking for ten minutes a day or writing a postcard to a friend each week. Or pick one of the 37days Do it Now Challenges at the close of each of these stories and do it for thirty-seven days. Whatever it is, however small, do it. Just for thirty-seven days.

That’s doable. Decide on It, the Thing You Will Do. And then, do it.

Perhaps it is something you will stop doing for thirty-seven days. Stop hiding, stop spending, stop smoking, stop making excuses, stop blaming or judging, stop eating Raspberry Frosted Pop-Tarts® with Sprinkles (purely hypothetical example).

Narrow your focus to one thing. One small thing. Just do it for thirty-seven days. Starting today, not next Tuesday, not after you finish off the Honeycrisp apples dipped lovingly in hot caramel sauce, not after that next trip to Bashkortostan or Albuquerque, not after you finish alphabetizing your canned goods in the root cellar or sharpening your grapefruit spoons, but Right Now. Go ahead—deepen, change, inhabit your life fully for the next thirty-seven days. Then start again. Every day is day one, a gift.

[While you’re at it, answer this question: Why are we so willing to disappoint ourselves by not following through on such an easy commitment?]

As Max Bristol wrote on the back of his jacket in junior high school—a message of great comfort as he ran past me during the mandatory one-mile run in gym class—”a man (and, presumably, a woman, I must add) can endure anything as long as he knows there is an end to it.”

In 2003, the man whose journey sparked this writing was diagnosed with lung cancer. Boyce died thirty-seven days later.