‘True North’ – Day 205/365

Talking doesn’t equal doing, just like not searching won’t equal finding.

(artist retains all rights to print reproductions of this painting)
Inspiration: common license photography


ORIGINAL COPY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM DURING THE CHALLENGE

Yesterday I put all my notifications off and sat my butt down and got two paintings done.⁠
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I did that because I desperately wanted to make time to do paying work🙃 AND to create my vision boards. It’s important to me and I knew if I didn’t carve time for it, they would never come together. After talking about doing it for months, the ‘I’m-gonna-conversations’ felt less like self-tricked productivity and more like poison.🤢⁠
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One of the captions I cut out was ‘find your true north’. ⁠
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I realised if talking doesn’t equal doing, not searching won’t equal finding….. ⁠
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Part of why I’ve been struggling recently, maybe it’s because I’m approaching the last quarter, is the whisper of ‘what if this goes no-where?’, ‘what if you don’t find squat at the end of a 365 challenge?’. ⁠
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Tim Ferris shares good advice on this. He says make fear lists and then debunk them, so as to not live in the fear in your mind.⁠
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So, here’s my fear on this one – if doing 365 paintings takes me nowhere nearer my great hopes and dreams then the worst thing to come of it is that I ‘wasted an entire year painting’. BUT, I could reframe it as ‘I rejigged my freelance work in such a way that I was ABLE to spend a YEAR painting just for the sake of trying something new’. Suddenly if that’s the worst that comes from it, I no longer feel as fearful. ⁠
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Still a little ‘uh-oh’ but no ‘yeegahds-I’m-gonna-fall-off-the-edge’ fear.⁠

And that feels like progress in a good direction. A true north direction even, maybe? Fitting for northern lights, I felt. 😁⁠
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📸 inspiration via @unsplash

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July 24, 2019