My last two posts were about clearing away distractions and focusing on tasks we must do. Our reward? Playtime!
Are you doing what you love?
Early on in The Artist’s Way course by Julia Cameron, she suggests making a list of 20 activities you love doing. Fancy making your list now? Go ahead, we’ll be here when you get back. (Whatever you do, don’t list things because you think you ought to. Should has no place here.)
Now go through your list and put a rough date next to the last time you did each item. I was amazed when I did this. It’s been months and in some cases years since I did some of the things I love:
- Make collage and soulcards? About three months
- Spend time alone on the shore watching the sea? About three years
- Work on smallholdings with animals and growing things? About 30 years
And the task resulting from this list? Pick two things and do something related to them this week. (I’m making a collage tonight and I’m taking a day trip to the sea next Friday.)
Don’t wait for the right time
Image by Veni Markovski
One invaluable piece of advice given by Cameron and others is not to wait until you have large blocks of time for whatever activity you are called to. Maybe you have half an hour you can devote without guilt to tumbling down the rabbit holes of the internet, unearthing some of the magic that lurks there. Take those small windows of time that occur during the week and pick out a new melody on your guitar, sketch a short story outline, read a poem, dance to your favourite song, walk in the sunshine, juggle, pick through your treasure trove of ephemera and be inspired. If you wait for the perfect opportunity, the perfect moment, it will never come.
Make a date with yourself
Having said that, some fun things and some pieces of creative work do require a respectable block of time. Put it in your calendar, just as you would a business appointment or a date with your honey. Honour it, make it sacred, don’t let anything get in the way. I think there’s a bit of a contradiction about playtime: you have to be serious about preserving it, otherwise the day-to-day stuff will just get in the way. And if you’re a woman? I think creative women need that streak of ruthlessness creative men have always had. There’s a film about female artists called Who Does She Think She Is? that looks really interesting. Check out the trailer:
Life running out on you?
A sign-off I sometimes use in my emails is by coach Barbara Sher: It’s only too late if you don’t start now. I must acknowledge her fabulous book Refuse to Choose for the ideas below.
When you get to middle-life, there’s often a feeling of panic. There’s no way you’ll get to do everything you want. You have all this life pulsing through you but one day it will be gone and you don’t want to waste it. You want to do everything, to grab everything, NOW!
Make a bucket list. (You know what a bucket list is, don’t you? Everything you want to do and see before you kick the… There’s a film of this name with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. See if if you haven’t. You’ll enjoy it.)
Then take the biggest sheet of paper you can find and divide it into six squares. One square for each of the next six years. Write the year in the relevant square. Then take your bucket list and start with what you want to do most. (Learn Chinese? Visit St Petersburg? Work on a donkey sanctuary? Start a cult?) Write your most important item(s) in year one. Then put the next items in year two and so on. Stick it up on your wall. This isn’t set in stone, you can change it. But psychologically it’s magic because it means you have a plan. Life is not just going to go on by without you. You can use that sheet of paper and take the first practical steps towards making your biggest dreams come true.
Wishing and dreaming
Image by Gail548
Finally, a practical idea about not losing sight of those little wishes and dreams that pop into your head at odd hours. There’s something a little strange that happens when we allow ourselves to start living the lives we dream of. All those synapses start firing in our brains, making connections, and ideas begin to flood in. Don’t lose ‘em. I carry a little notebook with me always and once a week or so I transcribe the ideas I’m in love with onto cards for my dream deck. What’s a dream deck? A box of index cards on which you write all these random wishes and dreams. Find a gorgeous box to store them in. If the bucket list is the big picture stuff, the dream deck is the detail and the decoration.
Just scribble down “make and sell dream pillows“, “start a blog about growing rare variety tomatoes”, “earrings in the shape of angel wings” or whatever, each on a separate index card. Doesn’t matter how ordinary or how fantastical, you probably won’t do most of these. But it’s huge fun to leaf through them when you feel like it and see just how amazingly creative your mind is. And if that rare tomato blog really grabs you, then you can start it, the idea won’t have been forgotten.
So what dreams do you want to play with? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.
Main image from iStock
Elsewhere:
Chania Girl, living her dream in Greece (and having wise thoughts about the financial troubles) writes about her Joy List here. And Anita reminds us we need some lazy afternoons with this delightful picture.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
oh tess, you know i love this post!! i’ll have to go back to my “play” list and see what it looks like today. i’ve been doing something similar in my journaling lately and realized there were three things that rise to the top each time i ask “what is my heart’s desire?” the top two seem to be at the core of reaching and enjoying my daily/yearly/lifetime bucket list: (1) time spent in quiet with God (2) creating a healthy body and (3) is the one i’ve been putting off – writing “my” book…
it’s lovely you mention those “few moments” we can capture to do what we love. i’ve started setting aside a small time each day to “write the book” and the pages are mounting
so, glad i spent some of my internet allowance here this morning!! xox
Hi, Tess. I loved this post! Like you, I have read Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, and try to make and keep “Artist Dates” with myself … but not probably as much as I could. All of these were lovely reminders of ways to put play and dreaming back into our lives.
I can tell you, for me, that when I get a free twenty minutes lately, I simply go sit on my back veranda and watch the flowers and fig trees. I don’t do a thing.
Thank you for the link love and for sharing my blog with your readers. I’m glad these posts touched you in some way.
was that a nudge?
i’m playing with the idea of starting an “artist’s way at work” group and this pops up in your posts
fighting the “who does she think she is” gremlins
thanks for nudging me in the right direction
List ~ I am quite a list person. Have you heard of the 101 Things in 1001 Days? It’s similar to the list of 20 things. The purpose being, to get us thinking about what we want to do, and then set out doing it. Isn’t it funny, how we sort of have to “discipline” ourselves to make “playtime?” It’s as tho’ we have to drag ourselves away from the tempting distractions and toward these things we really do want to do. One is one’s own worst enemy sometimes, I suppose?
On “Who Does She Think She Is?” When I think of the despondency of creative women who dared, I think it would not be the same, if they had had an internet to work with. What would Sylvia Plath have done with her own website? What sort of blog would Virginia Woolf have contrived? Imagine the opportunity to enter into a blog correspondence with Simone Weil, summoning up philosophical answers to her questions on the difference between explicit and implicit divine love. The great photographer Diane Arbus would be laughing about the absurdity of life in correspondence with a coterie of precious and unknown photographers from around the globe. All these women I’ve mentioned — great women who dared unbounded expression — in the end committed suicide, trapped in the gullies of isolation and despair. I’ve been there. No more. The Net is a woman’s place!
@Lucy: you go girl, write that book! I’ll buy one.
@ChaniaGirl: oh, the flowers and the fig tree sound absolutely wonderful.
@kel: I think the universe does the nudging…
@Roxanne: no, I haven’t heard of that list, it sounds interesting. And the knotty problem of self-sabotage. Oh yes, so familiar. I have to try and be gentle with myself now when I do it – works better than beating myself up.
@kigen: thank you for this delightful imaginative trip of bringing those great women into this time. I think you’re right, in so many ways the Net is a woman’s place.
Julia Cameron taught me to write ‘morning pages’. I did this for quite a while. When I designed a website and my older daughter suggested I add a blog to it, I found that my training with the ‘morning pages’ came really handy.
I also learned to make a date with myself, always to go and visit a museum or an exhibit. Art has always uplifted my soul…
Through the blog, I have met a spiritual family. I had hoped this connection would happen with friends and relatives. But my spiritual family is often unrelated to either.
Finally, when it comes to deciding what I truly want, I find that I now have to weigh it with The Two Standards’ Ignatian meditation — i.e. what my soul and spirit want vs what the world suggests I should want.
You talk of life running out — I will turn 64 this fall… Time to walk barefoot in the grass, wear purple and huge sun hats…
This post of yours is the most challenging of all the blogs I have read in a while, leading me to the edge of discomfort, asking me to leave my comfort zone, and look and see.
Blessings.
Claire, thank you for this thought-provoking comment. I, too, used the morning pages last year and have recently revived the habit. I’m finding it very helpful.
I agree with what you say about our spiritual family. I’ve been amazed at the people I’ve “met” through this blogging activity (and in some cases really met). I’m interested in what you say about this post leading you to the edge of discomfort. That’s a good sign, I think! A difficult place to be but potentially very rewarding.
Tess… this is fantastic, I would never have thought about doing this. I often have times when I feel that life is simply passing me by, and I feel immensely sad that I won’t ever get to live the life of my dreams.
I think that doing what you suggest here, can become a turning point for a more active thinking process and by that, I will get a bigger chance for leaving a job which is mentally and physically very draining. My dream is to be able to work from home in order to cope better with chronical illness. Just to be the “owner” of my time would be a huge luxery to me.
How to survive financially and be able to pay my bills is the one single problem that has kept me from “running away”.
I will get started on this project as soon as possible. Thank you so much Tess, I am so glad I found your blog.
From a fellow Benedictine (novice) Oblate.
I will start my