I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
Yesterday I was feeling bored with my essay writing and my painting for Things Men Gave Me. I had started a new essay that was very similar to the previous two I wrote. It chronicled a short relationship I had in 2014 when I was just starting out with online dating after my divorce.
I started a painting to go with it, but the painting bored me, like the essay. I didn’t feel inspired to engage with it, so I didn’t.
I did a quick Tarot reading to see if I needed to redirect myself. The cards suggested that instead of writing about disconnection I should write about connection.
So I decided to start on an essay about a time when I was in love, and I started conceptualizing a new painting to go with that essay. Meanwhile, I began a painting that has nothing to do with my project Things Men Gave Me: a loose representation of the hot pink roses I gave to my daughter for her birthday when she was in town.
This morning I still feel bored though. I feel bored with blogging here. I started to write yet another post about Women Who Run with the Wolves and it just felt tired to me, so I stopped.
I pulled a Tarot card in the hopes of inspiring myself out of boredom and I got one of the most boring ones: Judgment. At least that was my first reaction. I’m bored and I get a boring card!
But maybe it’s not boring? I go to my Tarot for Change book by Jessica Dore and see what she has to say.
There are two general ways that I read the Judgment card in tarot: as a call to adventure and as resurrection. A call to adventure is an invitation to change; that is, to leave behind an old way for a new one, to forget who we are not and remember who we are. Old stories remind us that hearing the call is not the same as answering; many heroes have refused a call at first, sometimes multiple times, just as many of us have declined opportunities to grow until we’re ready. Answering the call requires a very specific psychological task, which is that we forget anything that isn’t useful to the journey and remember everything that is.
Maybe my reluctance to move forward with the difficult task of writing the heart of the TMGM story is that I feel like refusing the call to adventure yet again. I’ve been working on this memoir in various forms since the events I’m chronicling in it occurred. I have yet to finish it in any form.
But at least now I’ve started sharing it.
I could have made this blog post Saturday Sales and written about how to sell it (not necessarily for money, but to get people interested in it) or what about calling it Saturday Sharing and pondering how I might get my work shared with people who would resonate with it? Maybe that’s a new category I ought to add.
With that idea I feel a little spark of interest, I feel a little less bored.