Hitting the wall...and bouncing back

Got up this morning and, despite having stayed up late AGAIN tweaking the blog, was able to fight back the urge to go back to bed and instead ran up to grab my morning pages journal. Did all 3 pages despite all the excuses my sleepy brain came up with. Good to be back on that horse again. [Score: creative awakening (CA) – 1, self-sabotage (SS) – 0]

But afterwards, while feeding Ryland his cereal and playing swords with Logan, I noticed I felt a little deflated – the same kind of feeling I used to get after “Rec” [short for “Recollections in Christianity” – these weekend retreats I used to go to when I was in my late teens]. Everybody would come out of those weekends on a spiritual high, feeling close to God and optimistic and glow-y about the world, but always, after the singing in my head died down, and I was back in my own room, back to the normal routine, the high would go away and I would kind of hit a wall and get that “ok, what now?” kind of feeling.

Inevitably (not being proactive enough back then to go out and try to FIND the answer to that question – actually, I don’t think I even had the self-awareness at the time to recognize the question) the further and further away I got from the event, the further and further I would slip back into my old ways, until I was back to the same old self I was before.

That’s how I am in general, actually. I get all fired up and gung-ho about things when I’m starting them out, and then some unidentifiable thing happens, and I just suddenly lose interest – it happened with photography, make-up artistry and countless other artistic pursuits. While I was pregnant with Ryland, I completely lost interest in scrapbooking even! (but not in the purchasing of supplies, of course :P)

When I felt that same feeling this morning, I got a little panicky -- was worried that this might be signaling the end of my creative awakening (already?! what a short trip!). I tried to think of something creative I wanted to work on for the day and I couldn’t think of anything. I picked up one of the books I have that usually gets me all fired up, but it didn’t do anything for me this morning. I didn’t even want to start on this evening’s entry for the blog. Then I thought, “Awe, nuts, it’s happening again. I got myself all worked up over these self-discoveries and realizations over the past few weeks and now, it’s starting to fizzle…I’m going to end up my same old self, and fail my goal for the year, before I even reach the end of January!” [Score: CA – 1, SS – 1. Tied game]

Thankfully, I stopped myself mid-freak-out. Something made me recall the thing in The Artist’s Way about time-outs and the importance of “refilling the well” -- especially after a string of creative undertakings. Maybe that’s what this deflated feeling was? A sign that I’ve overdrawn my shallow well with all the energy and excitement I’ve thrown into my BPS assignment, the stuff I’m doing with my morning pages and The Artist’s Way at Work and my blog and the wireframes I’ve been working on for the Sales Kick-off this weekend. I took a deep breath and a good hard look at my kids and thought, “f*ck it, I’m just not going to think about it” and I played swords with my kids instead and chased them around the house. Then we spent the rest of the day at my cousin’s house in Sac, celebrating his fiancée’s completion of grad school. Spent time with my family, saw some friends I hadn’t seen in ages, had a beer, a glass of champagne, and 3 desserts later, and whaddya know? I found I made it through the funk J. Maybe time-outs really could be the answer? Even if they’re not, I’m going to pretend they are. For me. For now. [Final score: CA – 2, SA – 1. CA wins!! (this round) :P]

Hard to believe someone could go through all that mind-grappling in one day, isn’t it? But um yeah, it’s possible and um yeah, I do :P.

-- AGR

On a side note, had some trouble with this journal entry, since this is the first one after making my blog public. Felt self-conscious all throughout, like someone was reading RIGHT over my shoulder. Found myself using slightly more formalized language and had to go back several times to re-write. Just curious, does anyone else feel that way when they blog? Or are you all able to tune that out and still write with the same voice?

The Process

Woke up late AGAIN this morning and once more, missed getting to my morning pages…how many days is that in a row now? 3, I think, but could be 4. I’m disappointing myself. But I am happy with the outcome of this week’s assignment from the BPS class (for more context view this post). That was the cause of my late rising – I was up until 2 in the morning working on our first layout assignment.

I’m really happy with the end result. It’s our first layout assignment of the year, but already I’ve learned so much and most of it, not even directly scrapping related. Here's what I came to realize during the process:

• You won’t necessarily like all the assignments you receive. But you can look deeper, and try to find or define something for yourself within that assignment that you can better relate to, while still accomplishing the task at hand. Whatever you don’t like can be spun until you DO like it, love it even. This is totally within your power and control.
• You don’t have to rely entirely/solely on external inspiration. It may be more meaningful to use that external source as a springboard to inspire yourself.
• You can start a project with lots of independent elements that not necessarily drive you wild at first, but by applying creativity, you can bring those elements together into a more appealing/meaningful whole.
• You don’t have to have a clear picture of the end product before you begin, in order to produce something good. The point is to just begin, be decisive and stick by your intuition no matter how unsure you are of where it’s leading you.
• The minor screw ups (e.g., smudged my stamping, handwriting was not as good as it could’ve been, accidentally cropped off the bottom half of the magnifying glass) don’t matter and are barely noticeable in the larger scheme of things.
• It doesn’t matter if no one else sees what you see when they look at what you’ve done [that’s actually not possible since no one will come at it from the exact same context]. But as long as it’s got meaning for YOU and you’re happy with the end result, it’s got meaning and it’s a good thing.

Yep, this layout really calls/speaks to me. I propped it up so I could see it while I straightened out my office upon completing it. I stared at it while I brushed my teeth before going to bed last night. I carried in to work with me because I wanted to journal all this and have it on hand to jar my memory. And it’s not because the layout itself is particularly appealing visually, or by any means what I would consider the greatest thing I’ve ever made, but because I learned so much during the process of creating it, and therefore it carries so much more MEANING for me. Glenn (my dh) even noted that I seemed to LIVE THE MOMENTS OF THE PROCESS with this layout more than any other. [That man is way more intuitive and a much deeper thinker than I give him credit for! I’m blessed, truly :).]

Nothing else I’ve made to date has made it out of my home office/studio. This is the first thing that I’ve connected with so much that I wanted to have it with me after it was done. With everything else, I was so focused on finishing the project that after it was done, that was it, it was just done, and I would prop it somewhere on a shelf or shove it in my mostly empty scrapbooks. With this project, I’ve finally gotten myself to experience the meaning of the phrase “it is the journey that matters, in the end.”

For anyone interested in the full details:

To be honest, I wasn’t jazzed about the assignment originally because it didn’t really get my juices flowing or anything. And as much as I love Heidi’s work (and her products!), not even her layout inspired me at first. So I decided to take a deeper dive into the transcript of Heidi’s audio for the week. In it, she explained in a little more detail the reasoning behind each of the challenge elements.

This deeper interpretation resounded more strongly with me. I thought about it in detail on the ride home. Glenn even helped me to brainstorm a mind map to represent a clean slate or starting new. He came up with some really cool stuff! I ended up copying parts of the mind map into the layout because it hit home so strongly for me.

When I got home, I picked out a patterned paper that had been in my stash for the longest time because I couldn’t figure out how to use it – it was a photo-real background of a bunch of magnifying glasses. The magnifying glasses seemed appropriate since I expect to do a lot of close introspection. I practiced writing out the quote I was going to use for my goal and then ended up writing it in the middle of all of the magnifying lenses. Then I cut out the one that seemed to work the best and stuck it to the background paper. I built the target around the magnifying lens since it was already circular and had my goal written in the middle. It also worked out nicely as a way to place may goal in the center of the bullseye.

For the light background I used another lighter patterned paper that used those old-school, computer punch cards as a pattern in the background. It was a little too dark for me to write over, so I sanded it and distressed it a little. Symbolically, I felt that was very representative of my quest to minimize the parts of work that don’t totally psyche me and turn them into things that better fit my needs. On the sanded areas, I ended up copying the mind maps Glenn and I created. So, I feel like I really accomplished making the background mine.

Before I copied the mind maps on the page, I pasted down my pictures and embellished them with my reasons and some other stuff I found in my stash. I wasn’t totally crazy about these pictures when I started and wasn’t sure about where I had placed them initially, but I went with it and now I’m really happy with the way they turned out on the page.

For daily motivation, I wrote my favorite quote around the edges of the page. It’s a quote by Marianne Williamson that begins “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure…” It’s one that really hits home with me and sets my mind in the right mode when I read it.

My purpose in capturing this detailed account of my thought process is not to share my method necessarily (because at this point, who am i?), but to share how I came to the realizations I did from this exercise, that are directly applicable to my goal and taking me closer to achieving it. When my enthusiasm starts to wane (as I suspect it inevitably will), and the layout starts to appear so common that it begins to lose its meaning/power for me, I'll have this post to remind me of the process and all that I learned from it.

--AGR

Slacking...

Hmm, guess I’ve been sorta busy this week…or maybe it’s just I’ve been more lax with myself and undisciplined with regard to morning pages and journaling. Missed a couple of morning pages this week (including this morning) because, well last night, I stayed up a little later than usual to work on finishing a project I had started sometime last year. It’s an envelope tag book that I had decorated with MM Couture patterned papers (love those papers!!). But it never felt quite finished because I couldn’t think of what to use it for, so I didn’t want to add too much detail, so I left it until I could come up with something…then this week, I got a newsletter from Jennifer Lee (the life coach that Glenn hired for me for my birthday in 2005) where she was featuring some items that she makes called “wish boxes” and “blessings boxes” and I thought, wow, that would be a great use for that tag book! The “wish box” theme fit the dreamy kind of symbolic, unstructured look that the book ended up with and then I came up with a title for the cover that I think is totally fitting for both my personal tastes and the book's purpose: Wishful Thinking. I’m thinking I’ll jot down notes on all the hair-brained ideas I come up on the drive to/from home (e.g., this morning I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to have a site where you post YOUR dream job? It would be like Monster but instead of employers posting job descriptions for their perfect candidates, it would be people posting descriptions of their dream jobs [I’m talking the really out there type dream job like “adventure travel food critic” or something like that]) and keep them in there, along with the additional stuff that might come out of some exercises I’m considering doing from the The Artist’s Way at Work book. I need to start dreaming on a grander scale and capturing that stuff somewhere…Anyways, I love it and I’m really happy and quite proud of the finished product.

I have another project that I also started last year at the same time as the tag book – a cigar box that I also left unfinished because I couldn’t think of a use for it. I think that would be a perfect fit for the “blessings box” concept – a place where I can put little scraps of paper every night that name what I’m most thankful for that day. If I had that blessings box today, tonight’s slip of paper would read “Ali Edwards.” I read her blog all the time and subscribe to her newsletter. At the beginning of the year, her newsletter included a challenge for picking a single word “to focus on, meditate on, and reflect upon as [you] go about [your] daily life.” I thought it was an interesting challenge, but I thought it would be too much to do on top of trying to find a goal for Heidi’s Year to Remember class. So, I filed that idea away in the back of my mind, hoping I would remember to do it for 2008.

But, as it turns out, as I pondered what to do for Heidi’s class, I found myself constantly thinking back to Ali’s challenge. Soon after I wrote my entry for 01/04 (or was it that same day even?), the word “find” seemed to creep in and lodge itself in with my goal. I still didn’t commit to using it for Ali’s challenge though, because I didn’t think it was cool enough or that it fit exactly what I needed…but the longer it sat, the better it seemed to fit. Still I hesitated…Then today, got another AEzine (Ali’s newsletter) and she sent a link to a site where you could do a search for quotes based on a keyword (http://www.inspirationpeak.com/). I tried it using the word “find” and it came up with 55 responses, almost all of which seemed to hit home and tie back to my goal as I read them. How could I not choose it after that? The universe is speaking (loudly) and I’m going to heed the message. Is that amazing or what??

Other things I did manage to finish include tweaking (in Photoshop) of some pictures Glenn and I took of me working last week – a prereq for this week’s Year to Remember assignment. I also did some additional tweaking on some pics I want to post on the Photoblog site (yesterday’s blessings slips would have read “Photoshop” and “Rhonna Farrer’s frames”). What I didn’t finish: any of the work I needed to finish from last week. I’ve still got all that HR stuff to migrate and the Sales Systems Vision wireframes to complete along with some additional tasks I picked up during the week. I SERIOUSLY have to get off my ass and get shit done, but I’m still feeling blocked and uninspired. I haven’t gotten to the part yet, in “Artist’s Way” where they talk about harnessing your creativity on demand…I don’t even know if there is such a part in the book, but I’m hoping so and I’m hoping it’s coming in the next chapter or so :P.

-- AGR

Family Appreciation

Today was a really great day. We started off by waking early to get to church for the 8am mass. We got there a bit late, but the kids were fairly well behaved – we only got a couple of grouchy stares through the whole service :P.

Afterwards, it was Family Appreciation Day in San Francisco. Mayor Gavin Newsome’s office sponsors the event all over the City, where basically families that are able to show proof of address for San Francisco are admitted free to all sorts of attractions all over the City. Lucky for us, Rose and Rene were free today and also happen to be residents. We met up at the Exploratorium and they got us the green bands that served as the free passes all over the City.

I love taking the kids to the Exploratorium…the looks on their faces as you let them run around and explore to their hearts content. None of the usual “don’t go there!” or “don’t touch that!” – it’s just the opposite and you see grown ups all over the place pointing stuff out to their kids just to see that look on their little faces that they get when they see something for the first time…that look of amazement that is just completely priceless.

We let the kids run around for a couple of hours (got some great shots of the action too :)!), then we took a nice long walk to Chestnut Street to have lunch at Amici’s. I love going out with Rose and Rene and their kids – their girls are almost exactly the same age as our boys, so it’s really cool that we’re pretty much going through the same things and can understand the amount of time it takes to get through a meal with kids or the number of stops you have to make to go to the bathroom or to feed or change diapers. It’s kind of hard when we take the kids with us when we’re out with people who don’t have kids – it can be kind of frustrating on both ends for the single people and us :P.

After lunch, we decided to head to the Bay Aquarium since that was an ordinarily pricey attraction and it seemed like a good deal to get in for free. The kids loved that too! It’s almost like scuba diving. In fact, Rene said it’s exactly like scuba diving except without the pressure :P. So much fun to see the sharks and fish through the kids eyes.

Right after the Aquarium, we headed to the Hard Rock Café to get our parking tickets validated. I consumed way to many calories with the Chocolate Peanut Butter Crunch dessert that I ordered, and we spent way more than the validation was worth with everything else we ordered :P, but it was a nice way to end the evening. Logi fell asleep right at the table while he was still chewing on his hamburger! That’s how exhausted he was from all the fun we subjected him to throughout the day J. Rose and Rene had to leave around 6 for Rose’s mom’s birthday celebration, so we wrapped it up and then Glenn and I took the kids (Logi sleeping in his stroller) for a walk around the Pier before heading back to the car.

Towards the end of the Pier, there was a merry-go-round and Ryland started making all these excited noises and bouncing up and down in his stroller (I love when he does that – it’s so cute!), so Glenn took him for a ride. He just kept looking up at all the decorations at the top of the merry-go-round – again with that awesome look of amazement! I wish I could capture that look on film, but I never seem to get the right shot. It’s indescribable (for me anyway).

On the way home, at one point, both boys were each holding one of my hands. Then, Ryland started kissing my hand like I’ve done to his on a number of occasions. I loved it and it’s a moment that I truly want to remember forever.

Now we’re at home and I’ve just finished straightening up the mess we left downstairs yesterday. Before I headed down to straighten up, I got to hold each little guy in my lap and just breathe in their little baby head smells and feel the contentment of the day. Glenn and the boys are up in our bedroom now. I’m going to join them for a little more family fun before we turn in for the evening.