
But then, when you start drawing you can never be quite sure what is going to happen next, can you?*
(Quentin Blake)
I’ve been playing with a single blog that has altered a little each day.
I’ve included the quote that caught my eye and set up the doodle I’ll be working on through the week.
If you’ve tried doodling through the week, how’s yours been working out?
One of the things I’ve been learning is that what I want** isn’t where I thought it would be, I had to move to somewhere different if I was to get there: physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually – something that I had to learn along the way.
Of course, the place I wanted to go to changed as well.
Who knew what I wanted wasn’t what I wanted?
I’m still learning and moving, with lots of course corrections.
That’s okay, though. T. S. Eliot declared that old men should be explorers. (Women too, please.)
In mapmaking, there was a time when cartographers would fill spaces they didn’t know anything about with sea-monsters.
Then things changed.
A group of map-makers came along who said “we’re just going to leave areas blank that we don’t know anything about and we’ll fill them in as they’re explored and we know what’s there.”
There are three things I realise I need more of, though, if I am to be an explorer.
Hope: to move me from here to somewhere out there.
Courage: to move from the familiar to the unfamiliar.
Seeking: to fall into the exploring life and never stop falling:
Paradoxically, a self-centred self cannot become more complex, because all the psychic energy at its disposal is invested in fulfilling its current goals.^
*From Quentin Blake’s Angel Pavement:
**I have just been reminded that want can also mean lack;
^From Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.
When you let yourself fall is when you stumble upon something new, without something new, why bother?
Thanks for this thought, Tiffany. We have to be open to accidental possibility.