Saturday, March 3, 2018

In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me.

Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

I come here empty and so, set a placeholder and go looking for inspiration.

I scroll through photos in my Dropbox; I open my file of quotes; nothing grabs me.

I pop into my Kindle app and browse through highlights in a couple of books I’ve been ruminating on.

I get on Safari and end up going down a rabbit hole of author websites.

I open Feedly and flip through the various blogs I follow looking for one that entices me enough to stop and read. I skim a couple of articles, still restless and uninspired.

Nothing.

(Have I mentioned that it’s been a tough slog lately? Perhaps not. I’m working at getting back on track and, believe me when I tell you, it is work. Work worth doing though, so I persist.)

Then a title grabs me: Creativity and Showing Up. I open the article by Kelly Ishmael on Minding My Nest and, in the midst of a story about an ordinary day are these words: “I believe that there is beauty and magic to be found in my very real, very ordinary life.”

Of course.

I am reminded of my simple happy philosophy and belief that the ordinary can be extraordinary when we pay attention.

But I haven’t been paying enough attention. Or, more to the point, I have been paying attention, but not to the better thing.

And so I return here and tap out a few words that, I confess, are more for me today than anyone else. Yet even in that I think there might be someone else who has been struggling like me, who needs a reminder of the miracles all around us every single day that are worth paying attention to. Maybe you too?

I grab a photo, and a quote that seems to fit, and I think that maybe this day will be different.