A year of (art) practice 🧑🎨
Hello, happy Sunday, how are you?
The beginning of the year is always full of PLANNING templates and spreadsheets and usually I get very into them.
This year, however, I’m trying something different.
I’ve set only one small daily habit that I’d like to keep for the year—a simple promise to myself.
This year I’ve decided to make art for 15 minutes every day.
There are some rules:
- Making art needs to happen in my sketchbook or on a canvas or some other medium where I’m working with my hands (like sculpting or papier mâché).
- Writing and editing videos doesn’t count.
- I only have to make for 15 minutes, but if I go for longer that’s a happy bonus!
I bought this giant wall calendar to track my progress.
Each day I keep this promise to myself, I put a star sticker on the calendar. (Yes, just like kindergarten. It worked for me back then and I'm sticking to it.)
It is such a small daily habit, but it took me 29 years to figure out that small steps have the biggest impact.
This tiny promise is teaching me to trust myself to show up at the page even when I feel empty and grumpy and tired. It is teaching me to set boundaries, to honor my own sensitivity, and to surrender to bravery and kindness and generosity.
If I learned anything from working through The Artist's Way last year, it's that small daily actions are what open us up to creative flow.
Indulging ourselves in a frantic fantasy of what our life would look like if we were real artists, we fail to see the many small creative changes that we could make this very moment. This kind of look-at-the-big-picture thinking ignores the fact that a creative life is grounded on many, many small steps and very, very few large steps.
My hope for you in 2022 is this:
This year, may you keep small promises to yourself. May you practice, practice, practice—self-love and small daily action instead of big-picture worrying.
What small daily habit could you start this year that would really add up after 17 or 33 or 40 or 201 days?
What could you do with a year of practice?
I made a more in-depth video about this simple and centered goal-setting process I used this year. Check it out and subscribe for more videos in 2022!
Things I’ve consumed / worked on / thought about this week:
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This lemon pepper orzo chicken recipe. It's been a while since I've made this recipe and was pleasantly surprised by how good it is when I made it today for lunch. It's super easy, too!
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Decluttering books and clothes to start the new year brand new 🎉
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Attempting to complete a 1000 piece puzzle for the second time this year, getting very annoyed by the cat sitting on the puzzle table, and ultimately packing it all away. I'm just not a puzzle person!
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Downloading Instagram to my phone after being offline since October and promptly muting most everyone. It felt a little better but I still found myself scrolling too much, so I deleted it again.
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Considering creating a "Personal Feed" on my phone instead.
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Learning how to make tamales with my friend Sage.
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Shrinking a brand new wool sweater in the washing machine even though I googled it and thought it would be fine... sigh.
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The best Chinese food I've ever had in Albuquerque at Chinshan Chinese Restaurant. So. good. Why did it take me so long to find this place?!
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Reading more about complex relational trauma (a term I'd never heard before).
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The art of Cornelia O'Donovan, which I love
