1. Every day is Groundhog Day
“We have so little control over our lives. The only thing we can really control is what we spend our days on. What we work on and how hard we work on it.”
“What your daily routine consists of it not that important. What’s important is that the routine exists. Cobble together your own routine, stick to it most days, break from it once in a while for fun, and modify it as necessary.”
Two columns: Thanks For and Help Me
2. Build a bliss station
Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth): “You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.”
3. Forget the noun, do the verb
Vonnegut: “Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.”
4. Make gifts
“If you’re bummed out and hating your work, pick somebody special in your life and make something for them.”
“Making gifts puts us in touch with our gifts.”
5. The ordinary + extra attention = the extraordinary
“Drawing doesn’t just help you see better, it makes you feel better.”
“Your attention is one of the most valuable things you possess, which is why everyone wants to steal it from you. First you must protect it, and then you must point it in the right direction.”
6. Slay the art monsters
7. You are allowed to change your mind
Like-minded vs. like-hearted
Visit the past and read old books
“We have such short memories. You don’t have to go that far back into the past to discover things we’ve already forgotten about. Cracking a book that’s only a quarter of a century old can be like opening a chest of buried treasure.”
8. When in doubt, tidy up
9. Demons hate fresh air
10. Plant your garden
Thoreau: “Live in each season as it passes and resign yourself to the influences of each.”
“The people who found the thing that made them feel alive and who kept themselves alive by doing it. The people who planted their seeds, tended to themselves, and grew into something lasting.”
“Every day is a potential seed that we can grow into something beautiful. There’s no time for despair. ‘The thing to rejoice in is in the fact that one had the good fortune to be born,’ said the poet Mark Strand. ‘The odds against being born are astronomical.’ None of us know how many days we’ll have, so it’d be a shame to waste the ones we get.”
“Go easy on yourself and take your time. Worry less about getting things done. Worry more about things worth doing.”