It’s as easy as stepping outside. (Photo by Josh Kaplan)
I have a confession to make. I was wrong. Totally wrong. When I launched this blog 2 years ago, one of the first posts I wrote was about carving out 10 minutes a day to feed your creative soul.
I got up on my high horse and said that anyone – everyone — could find ten minutes a day to do the thing he or she loved most. I was wrong. I am in the middle of a corporate consulting project that is requiring all my waking hours, and I haven’t painted in weeks.
The work is creative, exciting and satisfying. But I face many hours of pure paperwork, detailed budgets, cost analysis, and insane deadlines. The stuff I hate. And because of those hours hunched over my laptop – inside and alone — I was beginning to go a little ultram nutty.
Then it hit me, I may not have 10 minutes to drag out the paints and create something interesting — but that doesn’t mean I can’t create a little oasis within the confines of the tasks I’m facing.
I grabbed my laptop, my chai tea, my folders, and my cats, and simply moved my headquarters — out to the patio. Suddenly, with the sun shining down, the bougainvillea in bloom, and the cats pitching in, the assignment I was dreading morphed into a little moment of bliss.
I’ve written a lot of posts about the need for artists to change their perspective: turn up into down, whole into parts, black into white. But this little exercise taught me it is just as important to do that with my attitude. By turning my life’s canvas upside down I found underneath it the one thing that always helps: gratitude.
Done preaching – my spreadsheets await.
For me, just walking into an art store gives me a jolt of, “Let’s get started” or “Damn, I just have to work with those colors.” There’s something about seeing a row of Seafoam pastels juxtaposed with hot magenta… or a sweet shade of violet that reminds me of the miniature crocuses scattered in our front yard when I was a kid.
I start “testing” colors in the French pastel section – checking their compatibility with each other. I remembered a woman in my art critique group pairing a pale dusty pink with an olive green. Those colors reminded me of the striped Danskin tops I wore when I was 10. That thought reminds me that (also) when I was 10 — I never got stuck. Give me a periwinkle Crayola and some free time, and I was good to go.
