If you want to be interesting, you have to be interested.
-Austin Kleon, SHOW YOUR WORK, p. 131
Finished reading: The Secret History by Donna Tartt 📚
I saw the news about Justice Ginsburg while my husband was reading bedtime stories to my son. I felt hollow. The characters in the book ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, so my son asked for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich as a bedtime snack. I went to get him one, and added three plantain chips and three gummy bears to the plate as surprise treats. I felt so cheered by this simple act, and my son was so delighted by the snack. This is it, I thought. I’m so scared and so disheartened, but when I keep this, parenting, in front of me, I feel better.
Want to read: She Come by It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs by Sarah Smarsh 📚
Want to read: Dark Archives by Megan Rosenbloom 📚
I don’t feel like writing an informative blog post today. It feels like a day for writing something more personal.
You’re exhausted, right? We’re all exhausted.
I don’t know what to do besides keep going.
W: I would encourage you to have lunch.
Me: I will, but right now I’m writing.
(Y’ALL. I wrote NEW words for my dissertation today, words that were not copied and pasted from my proposal or comps!)
Please do not ask me how many times my son and I have watched the Courtney 1986 music video from American Girl because I have lost count.
Me to M & W: These days, besides you guys, books are my best friends.
W: These days?
Visualization to help us choose our next steps
I was reading some of Jen Polk’s blog archives a while back and came across a post about a career coach giving her this visualization exercise:
She asked us to picture a skier on top of a peak, unsure of what lay ahead. After taking three deep breaths, I imagined myself as the skier and was soon stretching out my arms. I started to fly off the mountain top, and when I looked down, nothing was clear. I realized that flying, looking around, and exploring are what I need to do right now. That is the next step for me.
I found myself trying to imagine this, and I kept getting hung up on the fact that I don’t even know what a skier might see going down a slope, except what I’ve seen in movies. Trees? Bears? I don’t know. So instead, I pivoted the exercise to think of some more familiar experiences.
I asked myself: What if I were diving in the ocean? (I haven’t been diving but I have a lot more of an idea about what might appear if I were.) What if I were ambling in the forest without a plan? What would I do?
I realized that in both cases, I would trust my intuition and focus my attention on whatever seemed interesting. In the ocean, I would trust that whatever I find will have its own beauty and magic, even if it’s dangerous or scary, and I have ways of coping if it is dangerous and scary. Walking in the forest, I would amble about cheerfully, relying on my intuition to guide me to where I want to be, enjoying the filtered quality of the light, the greenery, noticing interesting plants and animals and either noting them to use later or if I had the technology, using a nature app to learn about them.
Just as this exercise led Jen to realize that she needed to spend her time in exploration, my responses to my altered versions of this exercise reinforce what I kind of always know to be true about myself: things go best for me when I follow my intuition and pursue whatever seems interesting.
What if you do some variation of this exercise? What will you learn about yourself?
Image by PublicDomainImages from Pixabay
