A Shifting Focus (Part 1)

May means we're eight months in to our 'adventure'.  In a large sense, we came here following an impulse that was telling us to change our lives and to shift our focus within those lives.  Eight months later, I can say with confidence that my focus is much different than it once was.  I don't know that I'm ready to put into words what my focus was, wasn't, is, or isn't... but I've nevertheless felt a major shift in my energies and my idea of "who I am" or "what I do".

Impulses, of course, can be big and small.  The impulse to leave the city and move to the mountains of VT was, needless to say, a big leap.  I've since coming here, though, learned to follow smaller impulses as well.  I think (though, I'm projecting - hindsight is always...edited) that in the city I had let myself believe I was so 'busy' that I'd often have a fleeting artistic thought and it would usually be chased with "I'll do that when I have time."  Sometimes if I was lucky, I scribbled it down in a notebook for when I did have time.  But of course, when you aren't remembering to have time, it's easy not to.  We all know that.

We do literally have a lot more time now than we did then.  But I think that I could have had time then too had I wanted it.  It's more a mindset that I've melted into now that I simply wasn't prepared for then.  And it's certainly been a gradual process, this "shift in focus" I feel like I'm experiencing.  I came here buzzing with the energy (or lack thereof) of commuting to and from work, walking no less than a block to get something if I needed it, and trying to catch express trains.  You can relax and enjoy a walk to work, you can even enjoy a subway ride; I just wasn't, and because of it I was always "rushing" for no apparent reason.

And when we first got here, I was mimicking city life in the woods.  I was breaking up my time very specifically, working essentially 9-5, just in my house. I put work before home even though work was at home.  I took business calls on Sundays.  I somehow managed to be stressed about time even though I had a lot of it.  There was something in my wiring that told me time was something to be concerned about.

By late October, a month and a half in, I was (very slowly) starting to realize that it was "okay" to take time on something if I wanted it.  Or to not force time on something if it wasn't clicking at that very moment. To just stop what I was doing and finish that later, so long as I really did finish it.  But I remember, very clearly, the day I first actually forced myself into really stopping because I felt like I had to.  It was November 16th, the day after my brother's birthday, and I had just finished my first full-length book project as a freelancer (which I had approached with a very "must work 8 hours a day and be stressed from time to time" mentality).

A mentor of mine passed away that day, and I was crushed and isolated (isolated in a good way). Had I been in a position to, I know what I would have done: I'd have gone to a few stores, taken a busy walk, taken a subway ride. I'd have been "alone and thinking" but I wouldn't have been alone.  Here, we live in a neighborhood without anyone even in it.  Garret was home but he was working.  I was just sitting in my home office.  I was alone enough that I couldn't easily get out of it and... I actually had to process my feelings.  I got the phone call that he had passed around 9:30 am and by noon, I was sitting in my home office in a daze.  But could I really just sit there?

I promise you that at a time, I could not have just sat there.  From the circumstances of everyday life and from my own inability to commit to it. But the truth is that here, I have no schedule that I need  to stick to here.  Just one that I usually do stick to.  Somehow I willed myself to really do it.  I sat, and I let whatever was going to happen, happen.  I thought a lot.  I cried.  I sat and wondered and felt confused and weird.  And then, around four - four hours after I'd started just... sitting... I had an impulse.  Of course, the sitting had been an impulse too, but this was an artistic impulse.  I suddenly felt like I should draw on a canvas something that I realized over those four hours I was incredibly grateful had been instilled in me by that mentor. "Be Great." See, he never cared if you were the best at something, as long as you were giving it your all.  Be great, I thought.  That's what you're trying to do.  You followed the impulse and you're trying to figure it out.  It's a process.  Just worry about being great at it and don't worry about knowing all of the answers.

That day, for the first time ever, I had an artistic impulse and instead of writing it down or deciding to do it later, I acted on it, right away.  I pulled out a canvas, I painted it, and by that same night, hanging in my office, was a canvas: Be Great.

I look at this canvas often.  At the time, I was responding to an overall life value that I believed my mentor had forced me to live by simply by living by it himself.  Meanwhile, now, seven months later, I look at it and think "See? Follow whatever idea tingle you're feeling." I'm learning to - upon having an "idea" - trust the spark of "?" for what it is.  Every idea is a possibility if we let it take us where it wants to go.  Yes, there's the possibility it'll turn out to be nothing.  But what if?

Over the past seven months but more specifically the past three, I've seen Garret and I follow idea after idea.  We're learning to be open to our own creativity.  We're learning not to say, "I'm feeling ___... I'll deal with it later!".  Instead, when sadness, silliness, fascination, or inspiration finds us... we let it.

It's more difficult than it sounds.  Trusting yourself enough to spend solid time doing something that you do not know the direction or purpose of?  For people who lived (as most do) through school assignments for 23 years and then jumped right into very fast-paced runs-on-linear-subway-lines lives for a while, just listening to a flighty idea can take some practice.  Of course, it wasn't really school or New York that made me distrust the "whim". It was a mindset I adopted in both of those times and places. But nevertheless...

"It's okay if it's a waste of time because, what if it isn't?" Can be surprisingly hard to hear especially if it's your own voice saying it.  After all you are always keenly aware of that "...what if it isn't?"  But: I'm happy to say that following our impulses and letting them manifest themselves in writing or art or whatever they want to be has produced for us some projects that I don't think either of us would have predicted we'd have taken on.  Projects we're excited about and projects that are making us really happy and... well, we're having a lot of fun!

I sat down to write this post intending to share what those things we're up to are.  Of course, true to form, I've rambled on far longer than a blog post should be, and instead of doing what I came to do, I talked about a painting I made months ago.  But, in the spirit of following ideas and impulses, I decided not to shut it down when this post didn't take the direction I had expected it to.  Instead, I'll let this sit.

I will come back tomorrow to show you what we've been up to.  A lot of you probably already know, but I'm excited about some of this stuff so I feel like it all deserves a post.  So I'll be back.

Unless, that is, I get distracted and do something else!  haha.