Possibilities.
One of my favourite words. It’s the kind of word that has a face to match it. Widened eyes locked on a potential future, lips pressed together in anticipation of What Could Be. It makes me think of Einstein jumping on a light beam and seeing where it took him.
I was poking around in my blog archives {ugh, SO much cleaning up to do back there}, and found a post I wrote fairly early on in my creative rebirth, about possibilities. About how much I love the word, but also how it sends me into a bit of a spin.
I mean, if possibilities are infinite, where exactly do you start?
In thinking about what future participants of the Creative Spark course would need and benefit from most, it hadn’t occurred to me that I had actual written evidence of my own experience of being a creative beginner {or at least a creative recoverer}.
The post reminded me of something someone said to me recently about how having too many options can be just as paralysing as not having any.
This seems to be a stumbling block for many of us just starting out on a new venture. I know for example that in an area such as photography, where I enthusiastically dabble but don’t have any technical knowledge, if you start telling me what I can do with what lenses and use words like f stop and ISO, I quickly become dazed and shut down.
It’s not necessarily that I’m not interested in what’s possible, it’s more that when bombarded with random information, I become rapidly overwhelmed and decide to just not bother.
Things need to be contextualised and actually temporarily limited in order to put your foot on the first rung of the ladder – and feel confident and engaged enough by what’s at the top to keep going – even if some of the rungs are broken or hard to reach. {Stretching the metaphor to the max here.}
A class is of course the perfect way to provide this kind of framework:
- material organised into lessons
- a teacher to guide and encourage you in your first tentative steps
- assignments with specific instructions that build on each other
- a list of basic materials to get you started
- inspiration provided by those in the field who have gone before you and found out what was at the end of their light beams
Most of us aren’t constantly taking classes {well, except for sometimes!}, but a class is a good place to start because it gives you something tangible to work with, that you can then take forward into your life.
My hope is that whether you take a course – my course, anyone’s course – or find other ways to create a framework for yourself {an artist group perhaps, or a daily schedule}, you will give yourself the opportunity to explore those possibilities and find what is most magical for you.
What do you do when you find yourself faced with infinite possibility? What helps you to narrow it down so you can just get started already?
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What are your possibilities? Are you dreaming of immersing yourself in paper, paint and images this year? Registration is open for the Creative Spark ecourse with instant access. And because self paced doesn’t have to mean ‘by yourself’, it also comes with an invitation to join a private Facebook group for all course alumnae. It’s cosy and welcoming, and I’d love you to join us. 🙂
