Systems and the mind

Living in a blended family, with four kids, while starting up a business, servicing my clients, keeping a household running (and paid for!) all the while building my own ‘identity’ (and helping my amazing partner do the same)… well, it can sometimes leave me feeling ‘scattered’. And I know that this is a dangerous place to be, as I have a tendency to get stuck in that mental/emotional/spiritual space… feeling as though my energy is vaporous and inconsequential to any positive change actions that our world so desperately needs.

This weekend, however, I worked to change that… to help me out of my internal space and create a part of my identity that I’ve known existed, but never felt safe enough, nor able to bring to the fore before… and as an ‘artist’, I organised. While having been a public servant for so many years, I’ve felt that I’ve always had the soul of an artist. It is an important part of my identity. Of who I am, and as it is slowly emerging, I am realising just how valuable to my health and wellbeing it is.

So this weekend, I organised. Not your typical ‘tidy up’ version of organisation - I meticulously went through my wood work studio, and opened every container, every faded ziplock bag, old re-used jam jar, and whatever else I had stored the tools of the trade in… and neatly labeled each of the containers in the blue compartment organiser… one for washers (all sizes), one for wooden dowels (mostly 32mm but some others), one for masonry nails, one for finishing nails, and one for canvas wedges (as I build and frame my Wife’s oil paintings).

It took far less time than I thought it would - and is now a far more useable space for me to create in. And I’m left thinking, that it is not just the ‘art’ that I am creating in this space (at the back of the garage) as I step through the door of the ‘wood shed’, but it is an important part of my identity that I am stepping into.

Virginia Woolf once that if ‘we have the habit of freedom, and the courage to write exactly what we think’, if we can ‘escape a little’ from the common, and face the fact that ‘there is no arm to cling to’ but recognise that ours is a world wherein we look at our relation to reality, we can find an unknown artist that is within each of us - and artistically create a better life for all of us.