About a month ago, I started a challenge to draw a doodle for 100 days in a row. I made it exactly 31 days before I gave it up. Here’s what I learned: 30 days is my limit for a challenge. When I do (visual) art out of obligation instead of creative urge, it isn’t […]
The Clarinet Player and the Sleepless Night
I was working in my leased office on the west side of Colorado Springs on Wednesday around 4:15 when I heard a noise over my noise-canceling headphones. It was a young woman playing the clarinet on the patio outside my office window. To say I was surprised would be an understatement. That surprise immediately turned […]
Potential vs Achievement
What matters more? Potential or achievement? This has been coming up for me a lot lately in my daily life and my reading. I believe most of us tend to judge ourselves based on what we have or haven’t achieved — but in the contexts that have the most daily, real-world consequences (the workplace, interpersonal […]
Creativity as a Habit
The other day, I was listening to an episode of my favorite podcast, Creative Pep Talk, about overthinking. Like most of his episodes, host Andy J. Pizza took the topic in a different and more profound direction than I was expecting: making creativity a habit, and treating it as such. There’s a whole slew of […]
Sienna
Recently I thought back over the 13 years of my marriage and realized something startling: In that time, there were only two years with no major life events. For 11 of those 13 years, we’ve gone through births, deaths, major illness, big moves, natural disasters, etc. And we’ve survived … and even grown stronger through […]
Hearing the Inner Voice
After listening to John O’Donohue’s The Inner Landscape recently, I’ve been thinking on the concept of “a world inside yourself.” Though O’Donohue’s take is richer than this — his concept is of a whole universe of being inside yourself — I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to the notion of the inner voice. […]
