Week #26 // halfway through the year, wow! Over the past six months, this practice has renewed my relationship with drawing as part of everyday life. For this week’s issue of Circling, I reflected on the experience as I hit this midway point milestone. Read an except below, and check out the full piece here.
“Very happy to say that six months in, I have completed 182 pages! There have been stretches of time when this looked like the traditional one page per day — an easy add-on to my morning writing practice, or repurposing of in-between moments on the train or downtime in the office — but also plenty of weeks consisting of numerous skipped days then time spent playing in the sketchbook and catching up over the weekend. With the busyness of our July residency, I definitely fell more than a week behind for a while. But some of my time spent resting afterward included a return to my sketchbook and overall, things tend to even out.
Over the years, I’ve put a lot of work into releasing the idea that practices (spiritual, creative, health-focused, etc.) only “count” or are successful if they are truly, actually every-single-day. While I admire people’s perfectly unbroken runs of inspiring habits or practices, gritting my teeth through the early days and weeks of morning pages while working through The Artist’s Way with a friend feels like a meaningful turning point in my life on this front. The point is to come back today, and that the practice, the blank page, is there for you whether you showed up yesterday or not. Letting go of the shame of inconsistency or less-than-ideal engagement frees up mental space for so much more touching in with the practice and process over time, missed days, weeks, or even years included.“
