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