Progress Check
A forest of creativity, well, the start at least.
One month down already, so how am I going? I pendulum between doing everything every day, to the down period where I did barely one thing in an entire week. It’s hard when you start something large and long lasting like this. The temptation is to go hard so you get heaps done as its huge and intimidating so you feel you need to work on it all the time in order to complete it, but if you don’t take care you can burn yourself out. Then it’s ensured to not be completed. I feel like I am finding my balance, the stress of the ambitious goals has plateaued to quiet persistent motivation but with wiggle room to allow for days of nothing. Without focusing hugely on where I am vs where I should be, I have managed to roughly keep pace.
I am aiming for a tenth of each goal per month, it allows a couple of months at the end of the year to catch up any deficit. With that in mind I am on track with my art, music, photography challenge and craft goals. I am keeping up with my word count for my writing goal, just not the extra task to split it between the blog and novel. The novel is the clearly neglected loser out of the two, however I am nearly reaching the word count goal on the blog alone. My biggest struggle is the cooking. It’s an ungainly goal, not one that is easily split or tracked. It took most of the first week to simply digitise the recipes so that I can have a list to plan with, tick off and organise. However, it is still in the delegation stage. It’s the unpleasant task of menu planning but for a whole year! Sure, I have cooked things, but some meals require 5 separate recipes to get the complete dish. Trying to figure out where I am with that goal is a challenge. I am still working on a reasonable (read: achievable) distribution of recipes so I don’t get a massive log jam at the end of the year, or worse, end up with a whole day of just cooking sauces.
So far, I am enjoying it more than I am not. Some days are a little arduous when you don’t feel like doing anything and yet there’s this big list of things to do. But I am noticing, even when what I am creating isn’t fabulous or even presentable, the act of creation itself brings a sense of place, like creation is part of being human and by joining in the process I am fulfilling some grand design. The long tradition of creation, I feel it grounds me, like I am joining centuries of others who have had the same goal, drive, passion. It’s a comfort to know we all heard the same call and have all wrestled to figure out what it means and how we each need to respond to our individual wonderful and wacky iteration of that call. If I may be so bold, it feels spiritual. The process of creation feels like an exercise in listening to the universe, the bigger picture, the divine and partaking in it just a little bit. Even if its akin to a toddler plunging their chubby hands into a bowl of flour Mum is using to bake a cake with and proudly exclaiming “I am helping!” Even if the role is small, (and maybe more of a hindrance than a help) I am glad to be a part of it.
THE RUNDOWN
Art – playing with masking fluid and learning that technique matters if you want paper to stay as part of the page when you peel it off (10/100)
Writing – Book: 1139 Blog: 9776
Cooking – Headaches and planning
Music – (5.5/100)
Photography – Getting ready for classes to start next week
Craft – (10/100)