A new year is an opportunity for fresh ideas and new beginnings. To celebrate the arrival of 2023, I am changing up my Sunday posts. Welcome to the first edition of The Sunday Spark, a new series with weekly thoughts and highlights, nuggets of learning, and a sustainable living tip for the week.

In 2021, I dedicated my Sunday posts to the 52-Week Decluttering Challenge. In 2022, Sundays were all about sharing weekly highlights and bits of wisdom in my Simple Living Sunday series. This year, my goal is to spark positivity with simple thoughts and ideas. Each edition of The Sunday Spark will feature four things:

• Thoughts about something on my mind during the week.
• Three highlights or simple pleasures of the past week.
• Three things I learned during the week.
• And, returning to the reason I started this blog back in 2019, a weekly tip related to sustainable and intentional living.

Why The Sunday Spark?

You may be wondering why I chose the name The Sunday Spark. Well, I tossed around several names for this new series including keeping the Simple Living Sunday name going, and uninspiring names like The Weekly Wrap-Up. Then, I had a spark of inspiration!

Dictionary.com defines “spark” as: “anything that activates or stimulates; inspiration or catalyst”

That definition sums up what I try to do with every blog post. If my blog stimulates curiosity, thought or conversation, or if it inspires even the tiniest change, I have achieved my goal. My hope is that, by sharing thoughts and ideas every week, I might spark a little wave of positivity and light in the world.

So, without further ado, here is week one of The Sunday Spark.

The Sunday Spark – Week 1

On my mind this week: What will 2023 bring?

As we wrap up the first full week of 2023, I’m still very much in i-can’t-believe-another-year-is-over mode. I know it sounds cliché, but where the heck did 2022 go?

I often think back to the excitement of 2020 as we welcomed a new year and a new decade. Little did we know what was in store for the world. It would be nice if 2023 was more of a normal year after the challenges of the last three years. Will 2023 deliver on the promise and excitement every new year brings? Time will tell.

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Three highlights of the week

In my Simple Living Sunday series, I got into the habit of sharing three weekly highlights or simple pleasures. It was fun to go back and read through them at the end of the year and make a list of yearly highlights. Despite its challenges, 2022 was a good year!

Keeping the trend going, here are three highlights and simple pleasures of the week gone by:

• We enjoyed a quiet New Year’s Eve at home. My daughter Colleen and I played SkipBo together. It’s a card game my girls used to play with the babysitter when they were small.
• We “undecorated” the house and put away all the Christmas stuff. Although it’s sad to see Christmas end, I enjoy the feeling of extra space once the tree is down and everything is packed away for another year.
• Team Canada won gold at the World Junior Hockey Championships. I always love seeing and hearing these teenagers sing O Canada following a big win.

Three things I learned this week

Life is all about learning. Here are three things I learned this week:

• When researching how to prune Coleus plants, I learned that you have to pinch the flower buds off the plants when they appear. If you don’t, the plant will go to seed and die. I grew these Coleus plants from seed last winter, and brought them indoors after the summer. They are thriving.

• Have you heard of millet? This week I learned the United Nations declared 2023 the “International Year of Millets”. This ancient grain is climate friendly. It requires little to no supplemental water to grow, has a natural resistance to pests, and can be stored without refrigeration or preservatives. Definitely something to research further. If you have ideas on how to use it in recipes, let me know in the comments below.
• At work, I’m learning a new application to create e-learning modules. Thinking back to my days in training and development, I could only dream of software that would make this so easy. I’m excited to continue learning. 

Sustainable living tip: Single-use plastic bags

This week’s sustainable living tip is to eliminate single-use plastic bags on your trips to the supermarket or mall.  Did you know that these bags are used for only 12 minutes, yet they can take up to 1,000 years to break down? That’s a huge impact.

If you haven’t made the swap to reusable bags for your groceries and produce, make that your goal for this week. Learn more in this post.

So that’s the first week of 2023 in the books.

Drop me a comment below with your thoughts on this idea for a weekly series. And if you have ideas on recipes with millet, please share them too.