~ God told me to be an artist weeks 28 & 29.
Friday 23rd June, 2023.
I'm back! My week off (week 28) included an art filled trip with my mum to London, which although lovely was insanely hot and really busy - as a result, not that relaxing. However, I'm very grateful for my time there in the galleries with my mum [she's ace]. It's so special to walk around a gallery and talk about the exhibit with someone who takes every bit as long as you to read and absorb everything.
One of the exhibitions we saw was The Rossettis at Tate Britain, a stunning array of romantic figures, tragic stories and landscapes for us to gaze upon. The dreamy tones and poignant stares arrested me. Every piece was so so beautiful.
As I stood in front of paintings, like the one on the left [Dante Gabriel Rossetti La Ghirlandata 1873], I found myself completely drift away. The weight of my body disappeared and it was as if I was floating for a moment.
A peace I had not felt in a long time covered me. A deep, containing peace rising to become an ocean beneath my feet. It wasn't a scary sense of dangerous tide but rather an uplifting pool, keeping me afloat, carefully carrying me to shore.
It was a magnificent moment of complete stillness and contentment, a welcome arrival after so many months of wondering what will appear around every corner, feeling peaceful pretty rarely, if at all. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I've started to feel a little more gracious towards myself as I navigate the unknown that this season brings. I'm coming round to the idea that it's okay to and normal to feel nervous whilst in prolonged season of things seeming in the dark.
BUT [and it's a pretty big but] how do I show kindness to myself in the midst of so much change and uncertainty by pausing, resting and replenishing without stopping altogether or becoming a master procrastinator? This may seem like a bizarre question to you, but for me this is a real fear of mine, if I stop doing what I'm supposed to be doing, what if I never start back up again.
What if I end up in a cycle of just being and not doing - that's a pretty hard place for me to be. Everything that isn't progressing or moving forward can feel like procrastination - which for a perfectionist in recovery is a bit of swear word and something I'm keen to avoid. However, I've lived in the burnout cycle most of my adult life, only seeking to address it's detrimental affect on my body in recent years.
You can see how quickly my brain leaps and over analyses everything right. Suddenly I can find myself in a right mess of if's but's and why's.
Ironically it paralyses me and my head is spinning but I'm not actually doing anything, just existing trying to manage my over active mind. In a sense I'm procrastinating by thinking about how to not end up procrastinating, what kind of fresh hell is that?!
It's a bit like a brain short circuit that is essentially exhausting and very emotional.
It feels all too easy to me to get stuck between the two extremes of not not moving or moving too fast, not starting or racing to the finish line. It perplexes me, the should or should not of it all. The how, the why, the where.
Being an over thinker can be helpful tool in certain situations. For example problem solving, because I spend so much time up there in my brain I can think extremely creatively and conceptually about things with relative ease. However, being a mile a minute deep thinker can also be my biggest curse as I miss a lot of what is going on around me in the real physical world, almost all of it if I'm not careful. It's why my body screams at me through aches and pains, it calls me back to current physical feelings, reminding me of the world that surrounds me, so I don't get lost in the world of my mind.
If you think about it, I could easily spend my whole life thinking about how to live my life. I could quite simply fill my brain with thoughts about thoughts about thoughts and distract myself every single day. Although I love and value the dreaming my mind can do I don't want that to be the only place I experience my existence, I want to interact with the awe of actually living fully in my everyday life. I want my feet on the floor, aware of the earth beneath them, not just imagining what it could feel like - does that make sense?
I want moments more of how I felt stood in front of the grand Rossetti paintings in London last week. The awe, the connection, the majesty, the peace, the floating. I want to interact with the things that scare me instead of overly intellectualising how I can manage or move past them. I want to spend less time in my head panicking about the future and considerably less time obsessing about the past.
I want to hear God in the present moment, instead of only asking him about what's next because I'm panicking or overthinking once again.
I want more standing in front of Rossetti painting moments where all the noise of what has been or what could be is stripped away. Where all that matters is the connection to what is in front of me and the experience of that.
I appreciate that not every moment in life can be standing in awe, but what if it wasn't about trying to replicate a series of perfect moments of stillness but about adjusting my posture towards everything? What if the question what is important here and now was carved into my heart? What if my outlook was not only informed by fear of the future or correcting the mistakes of the past but about what God might be showing or gifting me the opportunity to experience right now? I think its about noticing the things, environments and relationships that allow groundedness to occur?
For me, these days, being around creativity , making art, spending time caring for or being in nature and laughing with people all allow me to stand in the present and be more at peace with what is around me. Additionally when I'm doing these things I feel a more tangible sense of the closeness and majesty of God. My guard is down, my mind slows down and I have more space and capacity to listen and interact with him.
So this is what I need to do more of.
I need to readjust my posture from 100% in my head to more connection to my body and thus creating space to hear from God and move out of the paralysis that overthinking has brought into my life.
I don't think I need to find this perfect place that means I never go burnout or procrastinate - my obsession with moving correctly needs to end now. I must rather place more energy and patience into strengthening my heart posture to be in the present and interact and care for what is in front of my eyes.
That's how I'm going to leave procrastination station, but realising that I can dismantle the platform and travel in a new way, a way that doesn't spend 24 hours a day evaluating the perfect next step.
I'm going to start my reminding myself how far I've come in the past few years and remembering the incredible and miraculous provision of God that allows me to be an artist in these crazy uncertain times.
Being an artist was always going to stretch me and challenge my ability to take more risks and try new things, but I think the biggest excitement I feel writing this is knowing that burnout and procrastination are not the only two states of being...
...they're just the only terrain I allowed myself to exist in before.
Here's to the new.
See you next week, Cath x
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