For the past month, I have been doing some extra mobility/rehab exercises every day.
This week, I noticed two things:
1) After my exercises on Tuesday, I felt great!
A little muscle-tired but my brain was awake and my body felt good.
2) Last night, when I reached down for Khalee’s water bowl, the movement was easy.
It’s never super-hard but there has been a sort of stiffness, a resistance, in my movements.
Last night, though, I felt fluid and flexible.
I love this for me!
There is no automatic virtue, no automatic advantage to doing things the hard way.
My best bet is always to check out the easy way first and only add more work if necessary to get the job done.
My TKD classes take a a summer break and I love taking time away from that weekly routine.
I generally don’t need a break from TKD per se, I need a break from having to get to class twice a week at a specific time.
This year though, I also needed the physical break, the time away from the movements.
After the stress and pain around my Dad’s passing in May and the stress of scrambling to catch up on things in June, I needed to just let my body do what it wanted to do at whatever pace it wanted to do it for a while.
Today, though, it was time to get back to those movements and it felt really good.
I just did the first four patterns, relatively easy stuff that my brain and my muscles are very familiar with.
And it was fantastic.
I loved the almost meditative quality of those familiar movements, the ease of just letting my body do something it knows how to do.
And I felt very satisfied with the whole process when I was finished.
Self care for the win.
Except for meditative doodles, I don’t do a lot of detailed artwork.
Anything that requires a lot of prep work or that needs a bunch of measurements makes the energy cost of getting started way too high for me.
(Meditative doodles are just ‘in the moment’ type of details so they don’t have the same cost.)
But, that being said, I like those round, repetitive designs that a lot of people call mandalas. I’m pretty sure that mandalas are a specific type of design that has a cultural meaning so I won’t use that name for the design I want to make.
I’m not trying to borrow or appropriate a cultural practice , I’m not pretending that what I am doing is sacred, nor am I adding meaning to it – I just want to make a pattern in a circle.
But making a pattern in a circle requires a lot of measuring and every time I have tried that, I have gotten bored with the measuring and haven’t finished the design.
Until now!
Last week, I bought some templates for another project and one of them was a circular pattern of straight lines.
The energy cost of using a template to make my ‘measurements’ is very low.
So now I have an easy route to creating these patterns for myself and I won’t end up abandoning my projects partway through.
Really, taking an easy route gets a bad rap a lot of the time.
Taking the hard route for its own sake, especially if it means you lose the fun and the purpose, is just foolish.
I gave an introduction at a family painting class this morning and I think I struck a chord with the kids and parents there.
I hadn’t really thought about what to say, hadn’t actually planned on doing an intro, so I ended up talking about how the fun of creativity was the point of the whole thing. And if the kids (or the adults) we’re getting stressed about how their painting was going, it was ok to turn it into a whole different thing. In fact, they could just smear paint around on the canvas if they wanted – as long as they enjoyed doing it.
I swear I felt a sense of relief in the room.
And when I went around a little later, several kids had done their own thing – some making delightfully glorious messes and others just veering off on their own course. I was delighted to see it.
And one kid was struggling through the process of creating the planned piece so I helped him take a break from the project and try something else.
I felt like I made a connection, did some important work, like what I said had mattered.
I love this feeling.
