Monthly Archives: September 2011

Be A Child

When I used to work as a workshop assistant and, later, as part of several different Youth Theatre companies around my home town, I remember thinking that adults really ought to spend more time learning from children.

The amazing thing about children is the way they prioritise their lives. To a four-year-old child the thing that matters more than anything else in the world is whatever they happen to be doing at any given moment.

Their play isn’t hampered by when they have to stop and go home. The tears that come when told they have to leave come and go in a matter of minutes. The time they spend with a parent is all-encompassing, as is the time they spend with their friends, siblings and others.

We all work busily on different ways to prioristise our days, to keep ahead of the curve and up-to-date on everything that’s going on around us, but maybe we should be more like children.

Instead of constantly worrying about what’s coming next, perhaps we should put more effort into being truly mindful of one thing at a time.

Try it yourself, see how much richer it makes your life and work.

Stop writing an email with Twitter open.

Stop pausing while you review documents to read the updates in your Facebook feed.

Stop thinking about what you need to do next or when you have to be up in the morning while you’re relaxing and cuddling on the sofa with your loved one(s).

Be present, be focussed and be four years old again. It’s remarkable when you make the effort.

Does Mattering Matter?

Does it upset us if the art we create isn’t seen by other people?

Does it matter to us if it isn’t?

The truth is, for many people, the act of creation will be enough. But for just as many people, there is no point in creating something that will never be consumed.

The difficult part of making art is to act as if creation is all that matters, because only then can you make something personal and emotionally connected.

Being desperate for your work to ‘matter’ just makes us create what we ‘think’ people want, rather than creating authentic work that really matters to the only person that matters: ourselves.

Settling In

Finding time for creativity is hugely important to me, but it’s not always easy. Reorganising and relaunching the blog has taken me away from my usual creative endeavours for the last few weeks and now I have to get back into the habit.

I’m hoping that keeping to 3 regular posts will help keep my creative brain ticking over nicely, while giving me the impetus to push forwards with other creative projects.

Every creative person works in a different way, but for me creativity stems from habit. I’ve always liked to believe that my creativity is able to be summoned at will. I now understand that it bows to no master, but I also recognise that it enjoys routine.

I don’t know if its the writer in me, or just the base level of habit-former in all of us, but if I can get myself into the right routine around my work day and my commute, I know I’ll be able to engage my creative brain and start creating things that matter to me.

We’ll just have to wait and see if they matter to anyone else…

How do you create? Are you a ‘do it while the inspiration strikes’ kind of artist, or a ‘head down, crack on’ type. Do you have triggers that set you off on a creatie journey?

Discovering Zen

I’m always on the lookout for new things. I love learning, growing and expand my horizons.

I have a fairly hefty collection of feeds in my RSS reader and I was noticing more and more of them talking about Leo Babuta and his ZenHabits website, so I figured I should check it out.

When you read something that turns your thinking around and helps create a new way of doing things in your life, it’s tempting to over-egg the proverbial custard by calling it ‘life-changing’. But, in a way, that’s exactly what ZenHabits has been.

I’ve always thought of zen as being more of the kind of eastern mumbo-jumbo that helps martial artists to focus and that many westerners scoff at, a bit like karma1. But zen is at once so much more than that, but so much simpler.

Zen is not some mysterious order of blokes in funny outfits telling everyone to be like them. Instead, it’s just more of a simple way to be aware of what’s going around you and to keep things on an even-keel.

I’m a stress-head by nature. I thrive on stress, but it also, well, stresses me out. I inherited a very short temper from my dad, something for which I’m not proud, but always figured I’d just have to live with. But even in the short space of time I’ve been following the zen ideas, I’ve been able to stay calmer, more collected and immediately more productive.

Zen isn’t for everyone. It’s not a cure-all and there is no ‘zen switch’ that you can press to suddenly feel calmer. To truly embrace zen you have to believe in what it can do and invest yourself in it. Only then will you see the benefits of living a zen life.

I’m in the very early stages of developing my zen life, but I can already see the benefits and I’m loving it.

Have you ever tried zen? How did you find it changed you as you learned and adapted along with it?

  1. I should point out that I actually vaguely believe in karma; certainly I believe that what goes around comes around. []

Just Hit ‘Go’

This blog has been offline for almost 3 months. The first month was spent wondering what to do with it, the following two re-jigging the code and re-designing the site, getting it ‘just so’ before launch.

Why, then, did I launch the site yesterday before it was fully ready, while I’m still not 100% happy with it?

Two reasons:

  1. I’m not sure it’s ever possible to be 100% happy with anything – there will always be things that bug me and that I want to change. So I’ll just change them as I go.
  2. It’s far more important just to get it out there than constantly be thinking about getting it out there.

In all the huffing and puffing over lines of code and photoshop files, I lost sight of the fact that the purpose of this blog is to keep me focussed on what’s important. Getting the perfect website just right isn’t one of those things.

Far better to get things out there, to open yourself to the world – to ‘ship‘ in Seth Godin terms – than to sit on your butt and think about doing something that you may eventually ship.

What project (or projects) are you sitting on, waiting for an excuse to start? When are you going to start? And when are you going to get it out there?

Refocusing Life

When I first started blogging, back in the dusty days of 2006, I began with a Statement of Intent. At the time, it was designed to remind me of the reasons I started the blog in the first place as well as letting people know what they could expect from me and it.

Over the years my blogs have changed faces many times, but this new facelift is something more. The simplified design and stripped-down visuals serve to remind me of the meandering thoughts and intentions that I let take over here and to keep me sharply, intensely focussed on what this blog is becoming.

You’ll notice the old name, SmileThroughIt1, is back because rack my brains as I may, I couldn’t think of a better way to sum up the purpose of this site or the ideas I live by.

What is SmileThroughIt? Put simply, it’s a philosophy of life that helped carry me through some of my toughest times. While waiting for my transplant, not knowing if it would come in time, I learned to focus on the good things in life. More than that, I learned that if I could find just one thing every day that made me smile, that day had been worth it.

This site is here to help me make the most of the second chance I’ve been given and if, through that, I can help, inspire or motivate other people, so much the better.

Before the lengthy break in updates, I’d started blogging to please others, to write what I thought people wanted, to ‘optimise’ my posts. But looking back over my archives, both on here and the original site’s archives, I saw that my best writing and the most effective posts came not from targeting an “audience”, but rather writing something for myself.

Although I hate to admit it, it’s not just my blog that has been through many twists and turns and a distinct loss of focus. Everything that’s happened in this blog has been mirrored in my day-to-day life and it bothers me that I feel like I’m letting this second chance slip past me without grasping every second.

This blog will reflect my change in mood, attitude and approach to my second chance at life and, hopefully, will help guide others through similar changes in their own life.

This story has no planned ending, no final goal, no means by which to measure its success or failure. This blog, like all of us, just is. And what it is comes from what’s inside and the people who read, contribute and support its aims, ideals and author (that’s me) along the steps of its journey.

Come along for the ride.

  1. and I’ve moved all of the archives onto this single site, instead of stripped across two blogs []