THIS IS YOUR PROMPT: Have you been bracing yourself for a new beginning? Perhaps one that is daunting yet inevitable, or maybe one that you’ve been hoping for and dreaming about. What will it take for you to get there? Who will be with you? What will it feel like when you get to the other side? If you’d like, use the refrain, “I will begin again as

THIS IS YOUR PROMPT: What role did superstition play in your childhood? Was it indulged by the adults around you or scoffed at? Do any of those early beliefs still hold sway? Write about them, and why.

“To remember somebody means to put them back together and to hold them within ourselves. As everybody knows—or will come to know—people who you can’t live without die, and you keep living. But once they’re dead, they can be with us all the time.”

THIS IS YOUR PROMPT: Choose a line from a book—you can grab the nearest one and flip it open to a random page, or pick an old favorite you’ve memorized by heart. Whatever grabs your attention; whatever intrigues. Use it as the opening sentence for today’s journal entry, and let the words flow from there.

Small talk has its place, of course. The checkout person does not get paid enough to hear the truth, and there are people in our lives with whom it’s not safe for us to share our tenderest truths. But among the people who matter most to us, why do we relegate such a fruitful question—How are you?—to shallow small talk? And what would happen if we d

THIS IS YOUR PROMPT: What food evokes a transporting moment of time and place? Taste the moment and write down everything you can remember.

THIS IS YOUR PROMPT: Indulge in your own “What else?” Start with a grievance, a frustration, or a fear. Ask yourself “What else?” after each sentence for as long as it takes to feel a little catharsis.

My modus operandi became this: to trust and find ways to delight in the mystery of how things unfold, even if it’s not what you had planned, even if it’s far from ideal, and to believe that facing the thing you fear brings you exactly what you need. In my journal I wrote: It is possible to alter the course of my becoming.

What is the moment—the place, the person, the activity—that has moved you to forget the time, to lose yourself, and to return to what can feel like forgotten depths (or heights)? And how can you begin to get back there, as early as tomorrow?