The leads:

• Be bored. My mom used to tell me when I was a kid that it was good to be bored. The eight-year-old me did not believe her. The 33-year-old me certainly does. Recently, while reading about peoples’ childhoods, I read that “the immersion in boredom is a universal in the biographies of exceptional people.” Not only was I thrilled that it was noted as a “universal” (smile) but I quickly realized precisely how difficult it is to be bored as an older person (#adulting). With kids, jobs, gyms, partners, and extracurriculars, there isn’t any time to be bored. When the room is silent, we put on music or TV. When we’ve got a drive, we make a phone call. Where there is empty space, we fill it. Oh no, being bored was going to require much more than carving out three hours on a weekend afternoon as “time to be bored.” And yet becoming bored I quickly began to view as integral to my journey back to curiosity. By letting the mind first rest, idle, then wander, it would have the requisite space to become inspired, curious, and creative.

• Get simple.

“it’s just we get so messy, it’s not that we are doing lots of wrong things
Our mind is so messy
We don’t keep it simple
And we end up making the life that we are living, so in-ordinarily complicated.”

Burgs

What do you need (like, really need)? What do you enjoy? Be honest. Really honest. It’s probably things like: 1) to move your body, 2) to physically touch someone you love, 3) to eat nourishing, whole foods for lunch, 4) to drink more water, 5) to stretch, 6) to laugh, 7) to learn something really interesting, 8) to walk instead of drive, 9) sunshine, 10) a slight change of context. 

I heard someone say something interesting the other day. To paraphrase: if a plant doesn’t grow, doesn’t blossom or bloom, we don’t blame the plant. We check its environment. We check the soil; does it have nutrients and water? We check the placement; does it have sunlight? Perhaps we should all check our environments. Change it. More sunlight, more walks, more water. More music, more silence, less supposed to. 

• Allow yourself to do without purpose. Yep, I’ve been in an art phase this year. It started with painting and then the interest migrated to collage art thanks to a beautiful and super talented friend of mine (<– srsly check her out, @gigiripps) All this from a wholly un-artistic person. I cook. I write. I do not paint or draw or… crochet. Anyway.

What I am learning from art and taking from art is simple: for someone whose every action serves an explicit purpose in life, big or small, taking action without explicit purpose is cathartic, freeing, and integral to what I am now calling the Ecology of the Soul (essay forthcoming).

In example, every job I have accepted in my life has been with the purpose of progressing down my career path. I play videogames with the purpose of finishing the game, adding games played and books read like trophies to my physical and virtual living room shelves. I take classes to learn, exercise to stay healthy, cook to ensure proper nutrition – even watching TV, which I rarely do, with purpose and intentionality to consume a specific thing (this, I would argue, is a good thing).

But what I never do… is do something… without purpose. Until painting. The day I put brush to canvas without confidence that I could paint, without an idea of what I would paint, and without expectation that it be something, was an important day. I thought it would not last more than a couple of hours before it faded quietly from my life, the memory relegated to a forgotten Thursday afternoon one day at home when I was sad. Since that Thursday afternoon, the creativity, joy, curiosity, and focus that have poured out of me onto canvas through acrylic paint, oil paint, and shit I cut out of magazines, has managed to rupture my static in a way that my year deeply required.

This un-artistic girl is now building an art studio in her basement.