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Hello All,

Well, it is week two of my mini refresher course of “The Artist Way” by Julia Cameron and this weeks Chapter is titled “Recovering a Sense of Identity.” The author talks about how we define ourselves and how that self definition is paramount to our creativity.

As part of this self definition and discovery she talks about the importance of paying attention. As with all of her Chapters there is much, much more to delve into but, as I stated in my last post, I am trying to choose one small thing from each week to work on. There is a particular paragraph from this Chapter that caught my “Attention” if you will pardon the over use of the word.

It reads:

“My grandmother knew what a painful life had taught her: success or failure, the truth of a life really has little to do with its quality. The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is in the gift of paying attention.”

When I re-read that paragraph I knew immediately that “paying attention” was the one small thing that I wanted to focus on for this post. I waited anxiously all week for some profound and delightful moment to happen that I would be able to write about. But this morning I woke up in a cranky mood with no profound “aha moment” to share with you. It’s not that I had a difficult or unhappy week. What I did have was some preconceived ideas of what was supposed to happen to constitute a worthy blog post topic. And I wonder now if that didn’t blind me to seeing some of the more delightful moments that happened during the week.

I have heard that our eyes can see much more data than our brains can process or at least that our brains process as significant or memorable and I wonder what that means for a life. We tend to process the things that are familiar. We perceive all the incoming data through the filters of our past experiences. That’s why eye witness accounts are so often different from one another. Similarly, my husband and I frequently have different takes on the same situation.

I propose that this is largely due to our lack of attention. We are inherently distracted creatures. We have a lot going on. When we are in any situation physically, we can be, and often are a million miles away mentally. I suspect that it is actually quite impossible for us to pay 100% attention to the place and time that we occupy at any given moment.

My personal conclusion is that it is much harder to pay attention than one might think or at least than I thought it was going to be at the beginning of this Chapter. I assumed it was as simple as “Stopping to smell the roses” as the saying goes. But then that is not always easy either is it? Like I said, we are busy distracted creatures. And all I can say about this weeks small task is that I will continue to try to pay better attention.

But what does paying attention have to do with our identity you might be thinking? Why does it matter? Well, I think it is about learning and discovering our preferences and desires. By paying more attention to things, we learn about ourselves. If we are truly paying attention, opportunities will be more noticeable and our desires and wishes will be easier to achieve. We will know more about who we are.

If we notice, for example, a pottery studio that we walk by, and if we are paying attention to our own desires, the small voice saying, “that looks fun, I have always wanted to do that”. We might just see the sign for the classes that are offered. In that rare moment of attention we might just go ahead and sign ourselves up to learn a new skill. If on the other hand we hurry by the pottery studio thinking about our difficult day or what to make for dinner, we could well miss that opportunity.

We rush through our days, they can seem common and mundane and routine, but what if we noticed one small thing, one bright and shiny beautiful delightful thing that we hadn’t noticed before? Who would that make us? How could it change us?

Pay attention my friends your quality of life depends on it.

And now on with today’s craft project.

It all starts with a box of junk. Because as you know I pay attention to trash. 🙂 I can’t throw something away without first asking myself if I have another use for it? Is it interesting to me? Should I keep it for some potential brilliant idea that might come to me later?

Yes my husband is a saint for putting up with me. 🙂

I played with all my building blocks until I came up with three designs and then I started gluing them together.

Here is what they looked like after they were all glued together.

To finish the project I used some silver spray paint and some matching silver beads for decoration.

You can see the whole process in the video below.

Happy Upcycling,

Advertising Disclosure: Upcycle Design Lab may be compensated in exchange for featured placement of certain sponsored products and services, or your clicking on links posted on this website.