Last month I shared that one of the great stories we can be telling on our blogs is the story of the Sacred Everyday.

This month I want to talk about another kind of story we can be creating and telling on our blogs: Noteworthy Days.

Sometimes, one of my kids gets invited to a birthday party. Now birthday parties are torture to me but they are so fun to little kids. So they bring home the invitation and put it on the fridge and the party is like two weeks away but they know that next Thursday is a party after school. My youngest, Simon, will count the days until the party. When the next week rolls around, he will be thinking about his week and he’ll be like, “Ok, on Monday I have swimming and then there is Beavers the next day (that’s the UK version of scouts) and then just two more days until Jonathan’s party!” The morning of the party, he will come in for breakfast and say, “Today’s the party!” You can tell that he’s going to look forward to it all day.

It’s a special day.

It’s a noteworthy day. It’s worthy of noting. (Or blogging)

Here’s the thing about living a great story.

We don’t have to wait around for an invitation to a birthday party to have a noteworthy day.

We can create them for ourselves.

I think we can get caught in the trap of waiting for something extraordinary to happen.

We don’t have to do that.

We just need a little bit of dreaming and a willingness to be intentional.

In his book on finding a great story, Donald Miller has this friend Bob, who is living an incredible story and so he asks him what his secret is. This is what he says:

Embrace whimsy.

Then he defines whimsy as that nagging feeling that life could be magical; it could be special if we were only willing to take a few risks.

When you look back on your life, what days stand out to you?

For me a lot of the days that stand out are ones from my teenage days.

Sometimes I think in order to embrace whimsy we need to get in touch with our teenage selves, or our college selves.

Do you remember how you would sit around with your friends and invent crazy things to do? If there was a free weekend, we filled it up.

We would go fishing or camping, or we would figure out how to build a fort in the woods. We wasted a lot of time, but we wasted it well.

I remember this one time my roommate and I were walking across campus. We were coming from dinner to our dorm room and from a distance we could see that there was a bunch of furniture in the courtyard. We got closer and we realized it was our furniture. As a practical joke, someone had moved our entire dorm room outside.

Now at the age of forty, I’m like, “Who has time for that kind of thing? That was ridiculous.”

But back then, we thought it was hilarious.

We decided that instead of moving all our furniture back in, we would just use our room outside. We stayed outside for the rest of the evening, doing homework and talking to people who went by. Then we even slept outside. It made everyone who walked by smile to see us out in the courtyard, in our room.

It was just a small silly event, but I remember it.

We remember the crazy things we do in life. We remember the ridiculous things we do in life.

Here are a couple examples of bloggers who are intentionally creating noteworthy days:

 A UK adventurer/blogger called Alistair Humphreys has coined the term, Microadventures, and has a book by the same title, and it’s all about how you don’t have to have a lot of time or even resources to have an adventure. It’s interesting because he does these huge crazy trips all over the globe, but then he wrote a book about how in order to have an adventure, all you need is an afternoon. One day. Maybe a weekend.

And it’s true.

Sarah Von Bargen of Yes and Yes makes a new list of things she wants to do every year on her birthday. She keeps the list in her sidebar, so you can follow along when she checks something off. One of my recent favorites of hers was to Take a trapeze lesson.

So, make a list of 30 things you want to do this year. Just brainstorm. It’s ok if you don’t finish them all. You can throw your list away in a year and make a new one!

Put something on the list that you’re a little bit afraid of. Then put it on the calendar.

And then embrace whimsy when it comes your way.

The week before I was leaving for AWBU, a gal texted me and said that because it was sunny, she was going to the beach to have coffee if I wanted to go. She said no worries, she had two books with her if I was busy. I had so much to do to get ready to leave town and it was one of those texts that I totally could have ignored or just said, sorry, can’t today. Or whatever. But I didn’t. I thought, she’s right. The sun is shining in Aberdeen. So I went. And it turned out to be the most glorious day. We sat outside at this little café that I have never been to before. The old man that served us our coffee treated us like queens. She told me a story about her life that made me happy cry. Then we walked on the beach and through the amusement park. It was a noteworthy day. I’m so glad I didn’t miss it.

So go ahead and put in a bit of effort to make a day stand out here and there. Of course we still have to get the laundry done and make the work deadlines and have normal days, but that does not mean we can’t have NOTEWORTHY DAYS.

If you blog about or make a new goal to create a noteworthy day, I would SO love to hear about it. Leave me a link in the comments or tell me on Twitter! And stay tuned because next month I have one more category from my talk about living and telling great stories from AWBU!