2022 Lent – Which Activities for Lent Time ?

Hello everyone ! Welcome back ! Today I would like to share with you some of the activities I like to have during Lent time, to help me achieve my physical and mental goals. They all have something in common, as their purpose is to help me turn my thoughts and myself towards Nature, the others and thus making myself better at the end of Lent.

Reading ; definitely a classic, since reading implies to stay in the quiet and separate yourself from your environment to fly into a totally different world

Strolling ; walking in Nature and watching it revive is one of the most effective things to sooth my anxiety and relax me. Just feeling the wind blowing in your hair, listening to the birds singing and smell the perfume of Spring again.

Staying in the silent for 15 minutes ; this may sounds a bit strange but it’s really effective. And not that easy actually. Staying in a complete silence, without talking, music playing in the background or any other sound except those of the house and Nature outside. Most of the time, our heartbeat goes along with what’s surrounds us: people talking, even shouting, the music or the radio, and so on. We are constantly running and so does our heartbeat. Having these 15 minutes of absolute silence is to force our heartbeat to slow down and rest. When our heartbeat rests, so does the rest of our body and spirit.

Gardening ; what’s better than gardening to get yourself closer to Nature ? Gardening is not only about growing plants, flowers etc, it’s also about taking part into the eternal miracle of Nature growing back every Spring. Gardening is taking part into Creation. Stay tuned for an upcoming post about gardening hacks for beginners.

Making crafts to gift to others ; this one doesn’t necessarily help you slow down but it still helps you turning to others. You don’t have to make grandiose and exquisite things, as long as you do it properly and sincerely. This activity is to make you think about others, what they like, what represents them and so on, and put you in the back for a while. One of the danger we may fall into during Lent is to think too much about ourselves, how we manage to keep on our food diet etc. The goal of Lent is absolutely not to fall into more egocentrism, quite on the contrary. At the end of Lent, we should have risen up, even a bit, and the only way to achieve that goal is to forget about ourselves and dedicate our bodies and minds to others, to Nature, to God and so on.

Writing ; it can be a letter to someone, a letter to yourself, some poetry or a small essay, acting like a piece of written meditation. The last option, the essay, is quite an interesting one since it’s purpose is to allow you to think about the world, human psychology and so on. And that is something we rarely do, as we’re busy with daily chores, our jobs and daily life. All these material and earthly thoughts tend to make us forget about thinking. We’re so busy to run to go working, fetching the kids after school, grocery shopping etc that we don’t really think about the world surrounding us, how one specific behavior human can have may be right or wrong, how our current society is. We just don’t reflect on ourselves and our society anymore. By doing so, we tend to focus ony on our bodies and materialistic things and neglect our spirits and non-materialistic things.