Slowing down

Lately the ideas have been coming so fast I can hardly stand it. I can hardly catch them. I've taken to jotting them down in a Google Doc -- just sentences or two to capture what I'm thinking -- and then doing tiny thumbnails on the art-trading-card paper I was suckered into buying at the art store on Hawthorne.

I just started a new sketchbook, and the first four pages are about India. The next two are just regurgitations, an attempt to get some self-promotion lit done and out of the way.

I am hesitant to draw these thumbnail ideas in the sketchbook, because I want to force myself to get serious about projects. Somehow I need to see an idea through start-to-finish, and maybe this will help. To finish what I start. To follow all paths all the way to their end. To slow down despite the frenzied pace my brain sets. I need to somehow resist the breathless chase from one fleeting idea to the next. To slow down.

And maybe this isn't right, maybe any and all things need to go into the sketchbook. But that's how I've been doing it and instead of using every little thing ideas get buried and never happen. The sketchbook simply because an urping-bucket, and once something was drawn to a certain point, I grew tired of the idea and moved on to new ones. I've read (though I forget where) that Picasso had this problem. Tiring of ideas sometimes before he even got started.

Some of these old ideas I've come back to. Recently I had to dig five sketchbooks back to find some original camera-angles (which turned out to be far more engaging than what I had been doing). But more often things are buried and are never heard from again. Whilst digging I found so many interesting concepts that were never explored further.

(So remind me: if I ever come up dry, tell me to go back and look at what I haven't done.)

So, if I do thumbnails on separate pieces of paper I can put it up on my bulletin board. I will see them and I will go back to them. They will be very crude, half-drawn, gestures rather than forms, with color ideas scribbled right on top if there are any. These will not resemble the end-result enough for me to want to let it exist on its own. And in the meantime I can walk though the idea in the sketchbook; all the way through. Quickly capture and then slowly execute. That's the plan.

Mostly: I'm tired of running around breathlessly, I'm tired of hurrying. Towards the end of my law-office job I started telling myself hurry hurry ruins curry, which is something I think I picked up from either the laughter club website or on Jenny Sue Kostecki-Shaw's chai pilgrimage website. It wasn't particularly helpful -- the idea was there, but my heart was not in it. How could it be? I had a job that was faster paced than anything I'd ever done, and I had an energy level that was not matching up, more and more. Day after day I was all but running for the bus, telling myself as I glanced up Belmont at the sunset that sometime soon I would be able to greet the dawn slowly, dressed in a sweater and my hat, not at a sprint dressed in a black rectangle.

Since then I've been trying to focus on slowing down while still maintaining the same pace in terms of work flow. I want it to be a constant moving machine of productivity, but not so fact that I start to lose fingers. So it's finding how to slow down, and where. It's making a point to stop work at 6 and make dinner, wash the dishes, and read for an hour. It's making a point to play fishing with the cat every day. It's making sure I go for the early morning amble yet make sure to start work promptly at 8. It's also about not being too bent out of shape when this doesn't happen. A schedule is a structure, it's not a law. I adhere enough to it most of the time to not need to bind myself to it.

It's still a bit clunky. I still miss library due dates, I've been forgetting to make it to the store in time for the good milk, I can't seem to get Spike fed at the same time every day. I still find myself racing for the bus or to make it to an outing when I said I would. There is still a lot of hurry, where with better planning there might not be a need.

But maybe not. Yoga class last Saturday was a good example of slowing down. And not what you'd think.

I was running late, yet hungry. I thought, I could go to Safeway and get yogurt bars. That's nice and quick, and I'll still make it, just barely. But it was 7:47am when I got there. Class starts at 8.


I thought, no way will I get there in time. No way.

So instead I sauntered. I had a conversation with the stock person. I picked up some sausage and a can of white beans. I answered the cashier's questions about the yogurt bars. It all ended in smiles and a wonderful feeling.

When I got back to the car, it was 7:57. I still made it to yoga.

If I had hurried, I would have worked myself up, felt angry, maybe snapped at the cashier, probably would have caught different lights and would have been just as late, or MORE.

I've been thinking about slowing down. Wanting to, asking myself to, and Saturday I spent some time learning about it.