This week, my artist date was to go to The Moth storytelling event solo, and I was in awe of how strangers got up on stage and told a story with no notes and full hearts. They were funny, touching, imperfect and the embodiment of the question in this chapter: “What would you do if you didn’t have to do it perfectly?” My high expectations and lofty plans often mean that I want to leap over the small, incremental steps and dive straight into the impossible tasks. “The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce at all,” she writes. Instead of ‘why me’ I needed to ask what next. I needed to see the potential of these endings and what could be opened up in their place – a fresh start, a shake-up of my routine, and push from complacency. I’ve also learned that the goal is not the point, it’s the running. Once I reached 5km, the treadmill did not evaporate – opportunity to keep running, keep taking strides remained.

The Artist’s Way at 30: Alicia Keys, Pete Townshend and the The Artist’s Way at 30: Alicia Keys, Pete Townshend and the

Cooperation with our creativity takes time, and we have to remember that we can often sense our own changing and experience a sense of grief for our old life. There’s something new opening up, I just don’t know what, and that’s okay. In fact, it’s extraordinary. Where to from here? Notes on the elusiveness of delight and desireThe book is divided into 12 chapters, one of which is to be read each week for the duration of the 12-week course. In moving through the mild-to-moderately woo-woo chapters featuring inspirational quotes from the likes of Toni Morrison, Simone DeBeauvoir, and Plato, the book guides the reader to heal and soothe their “inner artist child.” The quality of life is in proportion, always to the capacity for delight,” writes Julia. “In the exact now, we are all, always, alright.” We cannot obsess over how we will make something happen, we just need to say what we are doing, and take action. “Action has magic so simply begin,” writes Julia. I learned what can only be learned through going inward, even if that means looking like you’re doing nothing from the outside. Each time I sat down to write I took note of an internal objections and negative beliefs the subconscious mind blurts out. One reoccurring blurt was “I should be working” – even though I was writing, it felt like I wasn’t work because it wasn’t paid work.

The Artist’s Way Everything I learned from (finally) completing The Artist’s Way

I’ve spent been five years of inspecting how other people are creative and yet I haven’t written that book I wanted to write, or launched that podcast I wanted to launch. I can’t linger on that point for too long without spiralling. Tasked with asking myself what next steps I am evading, I realised I had to make decision about a trip to New York City I had talked about since the beginning of the year. Money, timing, and fear all got in the way, but the next step was to decide, so I booked the flight. I logged my anxious thoughts for one day and it was helpful for staying focused on the task at hand – redoing my chapter outline for the book. What we really want to do is what we are meant to do,” writes Julia. Why do I so often deny myself the luxury to do what it is I want to do?Work begets work and taking one small step in action instead of indulging in the big questions can help us further along. Week 9: Fear is not laziness

The Artist’s Way - Онлайн-клуб любителей The Artist’s Way - Онлайн-клуб любителей

It didn’t feel like enough to simply write for my own sake, as if there has to be some other external recipient of the words rather than my own contentedness in writing them. Julia Cameron describes creatives droughts as times in between dreams, listless, dry seasons. This drought has lasted much longer that I would have liked or predicted, but I am remaining upright and sitting with the listlessness because it’s teaching me something. Just over 30 years ago, Julia Cameron’s agent gave her the immortally bad advice that no one was going to be interested in a book about creativity. “What on earth are you doing?” the agent demanded. When we get ‘there’, there disappears” writes Julia, so we may as well focus on the running, not the end. Week 12: Letting goRather than a tool for vanity, exercise teaches us about the rewards of the process, not the outcome. With encouragement – from others and importantly ourselves – we can begin to reframe any loss, rejection of criticism. Emotions that might feel counterintuitive such as anger are actually a map. “It tells us we can’t get away with our old life any longer. It tells us that old life is dying,” writes Julia.