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Courting Your Life by
Marney K. Makridakis It
feels good. It’s
no accident that when we talk about our creative dreams and goals, the
word “passion” is often used. When
we find something that we love to do - be it art or writing or yoga or
volunteering or running marathons - we want to spend more and more
passionate moments doing that thing. However,
it’s usually not possible for us to drop everything else to focus on a
love affair with our creative pursuits. We
engage in lives of dissection, where our real life is “here” and our
creative love - the fun stuff - is “over there”. How can we
bridge the gap so that we spend more and more moments feeling the drive
and energy that we feel when engaged with our passions? By
falling in love with the totality of our lives. In order for us to feel
the passion that we need to bring our desires to life and accomplish
our creative dreams, it’s imperative that we feel good. Call
it “keeping high vibrations” or “whistling while you work”... when we
are feeling good we are much more likely to produce and make changes in
our lives that support the direction in which we want to move. To
this end, sometimes the most important changes we can make towards
falling in love with life are on a very small scale. Call
them gestures of courting, if you will. Making choices for
happiness, joy, energy... they are all efforts at flirting with life in
an effort to spark that love affair. So, we
can make inquiries such as the following: This
is a very simple act. It can be as simple as asking, “Do I want a
cheese sandwich or soup for lunch... where does the joyful energy pull
come from?” “Do I
want to make this phone call or that? Where does the energy come?” It
takes effort at first to make this inquiry when making decisions, but
in time, our choices will come directly from that motivation. That
place of motivating joy, purpose, and balance is where the choices will
come to find themselves at home. Spend
time every day doing something you love. Not necessarily something
associated with your project or goal... just something that will keep
you feeling energized and fueled. Spending
ten minutes every day - if that’s all you have - doing or thinking of
something that makes you really joyful is nothing to sneeze at. Put
enough of those ten-minute “romantic trysts” together over time, and
your whole body mechanism begins to respond when you feed yourself the
joyful stuff. You’ll want more and more of it and you’ll create more
and more of it. And
the romance of - and with - your lifetime will be manifest. ~ ~ ~ Marney
K. Makridakis is the Editor of Artella, who also leads popular
creativity workshops and courses for members of the Artella
community. Read about her creative offerings for your Muse and
spirit at ArtellaWordsAndArt.com ~ ~ ~ |
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