Our fifth step goes into what to do after you have read your wishes aloud. Well, you now get to check off any wishes that have come true, add new ones, revise old ones, and cross out any as the year progresses.
As you begin to notice your wishes coming true, we hope you find the kind of satisfaction we do by putting a nice check mark in front of every wish - every heart desire - that has materialized in your life. However, other actions may be warranted besides checking off the completed wishes.
Revisiting your wishes is the right thing to do when a wish needs some tweaking for greater relevance and timeliness. You may want to add a word here or there, or you may want to rewrite the wish completely. Whatever makes it more relevant and better time-framed is exactly the right thing to do.
Adding to your wish list is always welcomed. We think in terms of 150 wishes as a good number of wishes to cover an entire year. We start off reciting 101 of them and fill in from the remaining 49 as wishes come true. But these numbers are not hard and fast. In a future post, Barbara is going to relate her experience with an idea Margie proposed: "The Sunday Challenge".
Every Sunday, for this entire year, Barbara has written five joys and three wants in her journal. Soon she realized that writing three wants was the same as writing three wishes and so she simply appended those wants to her wish list. Do the math! 52 weeks times 3 wants equals 156 new wishes! Now some of her wants were repeated wishes already on her list, but others were new desires that arose during the course of the year. Either way, she added some wishes, revised some wishes, continued to recite aloud, and watched her wishes come true.
This COVID pandemic, though, created another category: “Wishes on Hold”. These are desires you still want, but, unfortunately, timing is an issue. For example, any wishes on traveling we had were put on hold during lockdown. That’s when we found two subcategories under this heading: “Postponed Wishes” (I still want it, but I don’t know a specific time frame for it) and “Rescheduled Wishes” (I still want it and I know a specific time frame for it).
Lastly, there are “Deleted Wishes”, and these come in two subcategories as well. “Obsolesced Wishes” are what I don’t want anymore, and “Cancelled Wishes” are no longer relevant to me.
We hope these thoughts on how to manage your wish list were helpful! In our next blog post, we’ll talk about the finishing touches on a year’s wish practice: The “Have” List, The Gratitude List, and The New Year’s Wish List.
Until then,
Peace and All Good,
Margie and Barbara
The Wish Mavens
Photo Credit
The photo featured in this post was taken by (and is copyrighted by) Margaret A. Herrick.