Author: Christine

Christine http://www.mombie.com I'm a writer/storyteller/director/creativity & lifestory coach with a black belt in ITF Taekwon-do. I read voraciously and I write like my fingers are on fire. I'm the founder and Co-Chair of the Association for the Arts in Mount Pearl and I'm the current president of the St. John's Storytelling Festival. I bake a mean chocolate chip cookie.

Best Laid Plans

So, on February 27, I broke my wrist at Taekwondo.

I was practicing sparring and in the process of evading a strike, my foot sort of stuck to the floor and I fell.* My wrist hit the floor and the rest is history.The author's right arm encased in a black brace. She is doing a 'thumbs up'. The background is an orange wall and a white windowsill.

It’s not a bad break, as breaks go. It’s a straight line and no piece of the bone cracked off. I had a temporary cast for almost a week and now I will be in a brace until at least April 16.

I’m lucky that I work from home and that my children are teenagers, so the volume of potential hassle has been reduced. I mean, I can’t drive, I can’t lift anything with that arm and my ability to do TKD is virtually zero** but I can type fairly quickly and I can draw (with reduced accuracy/precision).

I had to alter a lot of plans though – plans for projects, plans for exercise, ideas for reorganizing parts of my house. Frustrating, to say the least.

I didn’t want to spend this time thinking about all the stuff I *couldn’t do, though, so I decided to consider the next few weeks as an experiment.  And I don’t mean that in a chirpy ‘Let’s think POSITIVE!’ way.

You see, one of the main challenges I face when trying to get things done is the sheer array of choices in front of me.  Say, for fitness, my mind reels from idea to idea, wondering what is the ‘best’ way to get where I want to end up. So, now that some choices are out of the question, I can focus a little more easily. I can look for the things I *can* do instead of bemoaning the things that I cannot.

So, I am experimenting. What kind of exercises *can* I do? What kind of writing/drawing is easiest? What household tasks are still possible?

Let’s see how this goes. 🙂

 

*This may be a VERY martial artist type thing to say but I am glad that it came from me falling instead of my opponent’s strike. I wouldn’t want to turn someone off sparring because someone got hurt.

**I’m not supposed to turn my wrist, I can’t put any weight on it, and I am not supposed to do anything that might make me lose my balance. That cuts out a lot of TKD practice.

Thinking about Questions

I studied Anthropology/Archaeology in University and I have found it enormously helpful in understanding the world around me.

Among other things, Anthropology gave me a good understanding that the person who decides what questions can be asked (in a conversation, in research, in any specific context), has a lot of control of the outcome of a given situation. Good questions expand people’s thinking, encourage them to make new connections, and they open the narrative.

Narrow questions limit the answers you can receive and they can negatively influence how people perceive their situation.

I have come up against this in many contexts – and I often bring it up when I am telling stories – but my most recent example was when I downloaded an intriguing fitness app because of an Instagram ad.

Wait! How is a fitness app affected by questions?

You can find out in my latest ‘Fit is a Feminist Issue’ post ‘Let Me Set My Own Goals ThankYouVeryMuch’

Oh, here I am!

Now, nothing awful happened but this has been a frustrating start to 2018.

There is some sort of plague going around this year. It’s not quite the flu but must be from the same neighbourhood. It starts with a vague feeling of being unwell, progresses to something similar to the way depression feels, circles you into brainfog – and those are just the mental symptoms. Your body is going through aches and pains and nausea and sniffling and coughs in various horrible variations.

I had zero energy for weeks – I was waking up and immediately thinking about how many hours it was until bedtime.

Not that I think life is all about productivity, but I hardly got anything done – the only stuff I did was established routines – making meals, going to a few meetings, drawing a little a writing a little every day.

Last Thursday, I complained about it on Facebook and Friday morning I woke up feeling like I remembered how to be human. I wasn’t feeling completely better but I felt much more like a person with symptoms instead of a bunch of symptoms shaped like a person.

I’ll have to remember that FB cure in the future.

Anyway, so here I am, back to communicating, just like I’m people.

And I have this song bouncing around in my head, and so will you. 😉

Arts Fun: 365 Somethings Art Challenge

One of the habits that I want to cultivate this year is creating art regularly. I do lots of creative things on a regular basis – storytelling, writing, brainstorming – but I don’t have a consistent practice for creating visual art. I usually have 2 or 3 times during the year when I invest my time in drawing or art journaling but it slides off my radar the rest of the time.

But, this year thanks to Hanna and Tammy (who developed the project) and Amy (I found out about it from her), I am participating in the 365 Somethings Challenge.

The point of this challenge is not necessarily to produce a piece of art each day, but to create 365 pieces of art during this year. So I can do them daily, or do 7 pieces per week, or follow whatever schedule suits me.

I’ve decided to do 365 pages in my art journal. I’m not sure what other constraints I will put on myself as time goes by, but I can already feel that useful constraints will develop.

Here’s my something for today…A notebook page with a yellow and orange background and three starburst shapes on it, one orange, one blue and one green. There are small circles of each colour on the sheet.

 

 

What I’m Reading

I am happy to report that, even though I am only part way through Morgan-Cole’s Most Anything You Please, it is every bit as terrific as her previous books.IMG_1019

Reading Trudy’s work is an immersive experience. Whenever I get the opportunity to read her work, I look forward to sinking right into her story and making friends with her characters.

Trudy doesn’t create worlds, she creates neighbourhoods, and, then, she fills those neighbourhoods with people you know. You feel like these are characters from your own past, or perhaps people your parents have told you about.

They feel familiar, perhaps that even if you don’t exactly know them, you know people like them. They make sense and you care about them.

What more could you want out of a story?