Tilted Windmills

As I continue to recover in hospital, Stefan and I have been exploring how focused attention, visualization and creativity can help manage the physical and mental pain of my experience. In this post, we discuss what we've discovered on this journey thus far. https://lnkd.in/g69x9fB8

Convincing grown-ups to play with art supplies can sometimes be a hard sell. Some grown-ups consider creativity to be a frivolous endeavour and seem skeptical about the real-world benefits that spending time with crayons and paint might provide. In this week's post, I dive into how exercising creativity through art-making can open up new ways of thinking that can spill over into everyday life.

"I don't have time" is a refrain we often hear from folks who want to bring creativity into their lives. It is true as adults that you have a large number of competing priorities and it's hard to imagine carving out great swaths of time to settle in with a creative project. But what about 10 minutes? Let's say you want to start playing around with creating paper collages but envision the project is going to take hours to complete. It might if you were to do all the steps all at once from start to finish, but nothing is stopping you from taking that project and breaking it down into bite-sized chunks. - Create a Pinterest board of paper collage examples that you like. (10 minutes) - Sketch out some ideas of things you might want to try (10 minutes) - Leaf through old magazines and put post-its on interesting images to cut out in future (10 minutes) - Cut out some collage elements and put them in a ziploc bag for safe keeping (10 minutes) - Pull together and lay out all your collage supplies in a quiet corner, but don't feel like you need to start anything yet (10 minutes) - Glue down a few things and see how it feels (10 minutes) Some of these steps might take multiple 10-minute sessions and that's perfectly fine. Also, if you're feeling inspired and want to keep going after that first 10 minutes, then keep going! The important thing here is to start and commit to just 10 minutes in a day. If you're able to do that, then you never know where your creativity might take you...

Whenever you're wondering why you feel stuck creatively, ask yourself... are you having fun? If you aren't... what belief are you holding that's turning this activity into work? (Note: grown-ups tend to turn EVERYTHING into work. 😅) What can you do to make it fun? What can you do to turn it into play?

In our hectic modern world, many folks struggle with managing finite resources like time, energy and attention. When these areas are out of balance it can leave you feeling burned out and overwhelmed. In this week's article for Tilted Windmills, I share a wealth of practical strategies that I've learned through a lifetime of living with a disability. ♿