Bonus content! Bare Minimum Artist's Way

Week 6: discovering a sense of abundance

This week was well timed. I am in the middle of a period of overwhelm. Work is super busy and stressful (cry-in-the-greenhouse stressful), renovation work is happening, family are in town. There is a lot going on and I’m not loving it to be honest. I’ve been neglecting this little corner of the internet, and specifically the Artist’s Way project, because it’s hard to think about abundance when you’re struggling to keep your head above the water.

When I eventually made time to sit down and read this chapter (and re-listen to Internet People’s discussion), I realised that these periods in my life are when I need a sense of abundance more than ever. It’s not about making it big, earning the monies, being able to afford all the things. It’s about bringing that sense of your ‘rich life’ into the every day.

There is a lot of God chat in this chapter, which was another barrier to me. As a firm atheist and scientist, I find when Julia channels her thoughts through the medium of God or the Great Creator, it leaves me cold. I try to see past the religious aspects to the underlying message, but there’s a lot of religiosity to sift through in chapter 6. Essentially, her message is that we often associate ‘work’ in the traditional sense as being hard, something that must cause suffering and stress in order to be valid. We consider creative pursuits to be frivolous, something to be done for pleasure, in our spare time away from work. We don’t believe that something fun and creative could also be considered work, could be a pursuit that brings joy AND income. She says “many of us equate difficulty with virtue - and art with fooling around. Hard work is good. A terrible job must be building our moral fibre”. A creative pursuit, such as painting, that comes easily and brings joy must therefore not be taken seriously, and couldn’t be something on which we could rely to pay our bills.

I definitely empathise with this, being raised in a household where hard work was valued above all else. Whilst I appreciate the strong work ethic that has engrained in me as an adult, the flip side is I find it hard to give myself space to rest and be creative. Anything not ‘productive’ in the traditional sense of paid work, renovation labour, or household chores, is hard to prioritise. Rest, hobbies, watching TV, even exercise have been difficult for me. I find myself continually putting them off, telling myself once I’ve done this task or that chore, I’ll allow myself to sit down or go for a run. Unfortunately, I then get to the end of the day without giving myself that time, and then feel tired and resentful.

Make art begins with making hay while the sun shines. It begins with getting into the now and enjoying your day.

This quote from Julia nicely summarised this problem. By not giving myself time to rest and enjoy myself, I stymie my own creativity. As I’ve found during this time of overwhelm, it’s difficult to create from a place of exhaustion, and my creative projects (like this blog) have suffered.

What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do. When we do what we are meant to do, money comes to us, doors open for us, we feel useful, and the work we do feels like play to us.

Lordy Julia, this paragraph could have been tighter, no? But I get the gist. It also helps me feel more settled in my vet work. Yes it’s stressful sometimes, and no I wouldn’t describe it as feeling like ‘play’, but it is what I’m meant to do, at least at this period in my life. As a consequence it brings money, I feel useful, and doors open. I need to remember that in my more fraught moments, and appreciate the financial stability my day job brings us, even as I work to create something different for myself in the future.

On Internet People, MJ and Anna did an exercise wherein they each listed 5 things they could do or are doing to feel abundance in their lives. I like this idea, it’s a good way to practice gratitude for the things you already have, and a means of identifying ways to improve your situation.

After some deliberation, here are my 5 ways to allow myself to feel daily abundance:

1. continue to prioritise reading books, over scrolling on my phone (my last podcast episode was about this exact topic!)

2. make time to care for myself with activities that feel frivolous but improve my self esteem e.g. plucking my eyebrows, shaving my legs, giving myself a mani-pedi. These are activities I don’t prioritise because they feel trivial or unimportant, but overall they make a big difference to how I feel about myself. I don’t wear make up daily, but feeling clean and well put together makes me feel like I’m presenting my best self to the world. When I’m tired or overwhelmed, it’s often these little things that slip, which compounds my stress because I feel slovenly and unkempt

3. wear the nice clothes! In this renovation period of life, I feel like I’m living in rough clothes. Badly fitting jeans with paint marks and holes, sweatshirts in the wrong colours that make me look washed out; I look and feel dishevelled. Often I’m reaching for these clothes out of habit, I don’t necessarily need to wear them for the activity that day. Obviously if I’m doing something where my clothes may get ruined, like painting, it makes sense to wear old clothes, or a boiler suit over the top. But often I dress this way without thinking, then find myself running into someone I know in Tesco and feeling bad about myself. See also: point 2

4. allow myself time to rest. It’s OK to sit, knit and watch TV in the afternoon. The entire day doesn’t need to be filled with productivity tasks. I feel like I need this tattooed on myself somewhere

5. caring for my body through food and movement. Often when I’m stressed and overwhelmed, the first things to go are healthy meals and exercise. I don’t feel I have the time or capacity to batch cook, or make smoothies, so I rely on peanut butter toast and cheese to get through the day. I don’t run or go to the gym because I feel I don’t have time. The compound effect though, is that on top of feeling tired and overwhelmed, I also feel guilt and shame at not caring for myself properly. Healthy food and exercise are daily ways I can show myself a sense of abundance, by prioritising my own wellbeing over the slog of whatever productivity task I’ve convinced myself is essential

Writing these down will hopefully help me recall them when I'm next down the rabbit hole. It's a helpful task to do every so often, turns out Julia Cameron was onto something here.