I keep meaning to write here but then the days have been so long that, by evening time, I find myself too tired to put together any cohesive thoughts. So I keep postponing it again and again. I figured having some post might still be better than a super-cohesive one, so here we go. A little list of what’s going on here, in no particular order:

• I was delighted to be on PRT today and it will really fun. You can listen here.
• I have already finished my December Daily album initial pages. I used the Gossamer Blue kit as part of this class. I love December!
• I’m still thinking quite a bit about 2014. I think I’ve got all my projects down. I’ve already begun to experiment with each to adjust as needed and nail them down.
• I’ve sort of stopped sketching partly because life’s been so hectic. But, instead, I’ve been drawing a face a day. I’ll share soon.
• Work’s been really, really busy lately and it’s leaving me quite drained and tired. Even more so if I happen to have to drive into work. It’s made me appreciate working from home that much more.
• I am very excited that the Red Sox made it to the World Series. When I was pregnant with David, in 2005, I watched every game and cheered them on. Let’s see if I can do it again.
• I have a long list of to do list items and emails that are just piling up and seeing them makes me depressed.
• I’ve been contemplating a de-cluttering project in several parts of my house but just thinking about the size of that project overwhelms me.
• I’ve picked my word for 2014. Even though new ones keep coming to me, I am content to stick with it.
• I am playing more Candy Crush than any one human should ever play. It’s just not right.
• I have been meaning to write about my birthday, Jake’s birthday and finally getting my coaching certification. All of these big events happened back in September and yet I never wrote about them.
• I’ve been taking a lot fewer photos than usual and this makes me sad but I am also learning to forgive myself regularly and let myself off the hook regularly because I know that things are just stressful at this moment and I need rest.
• My friend Josh has this wonderful TEDx talk and I loved watching it. Great for remembering what matters most.
• And even though I haven’t finished it yet, I know this TEDx talk will be exceptional too. I loved Kristin Neff’s book.
• One more TED talk for you from my willpower teacher Kelly Mcgonigal. She’s awesome, isn’t she?
• I am taking Soul Comfort with Brave Girls and loving it. Two of my year-long projects for 2014 came from that class.
• I’m also taking Brene’s Oprah course and loving it, of course. I love Brené.
• I was so excitedly waiting for Allegient to come out and I can’t believe that I haven’t finished it yet!
• I am so looking forward to the Ender’s Game movie. I hope it’s as great as the book.
• I haven’t been journaling as much as I’d like and I’ve realized that, for me, journaling serves a very distinct soul-emptying purpose and I need it so I have to make it a higher priority.
• And sleep. I need more sleep. I know it’s counter-intuitive but I’ve noticed that when I am too tired, I actually waste more time and get less sleep.

 I could probably write more but I have a coaching client in 12 minutes and I need to have some dinner before then. I hope maybe you can share some of what you’ve been up to as well. 

I’ve been quiet here because work’s been insane and my back is acting up and honestly I don’t really know what else. I just haven’t been feeling like writing or able to write. I am still making plans for next year. I recently reread a few old posts and if you’re busy making plans for next year, too, maybe this one will help you out: Making Three Lists.

I’ve decided what I need next year is a lot more pre-planning. One of the reasons I struggle when sticking to plans is that I have to spend so much time coming up with ideas. When I sit down to sketch, I need to spend hours online finding something to sketch. I figured that if I had it all ready ahead of time, I wouldn’t waste as much time coming up with ideas each week. And, of course, if I have a new idea, it can supersede my list. But it’s no pressure this way.

Or maybe I am fooling myself.

Either way, that’s what’s on my mind. Since I am all excited about my projects, I figure this is a good time to do research and groundwork. I’ve also been thinking about my list answers from the thee lists post above. And what kind of thoughts-posts I might like to do. And what projects I might want to do with David and with Nathaniel.

The planning is making me happy for now so I am trying to keep at it. Here’s a dump of all that I am considering in case it’s helpful for any of you. This is just a dump of what’s on my head at this moment. It might all stay and it might all go or some combination in between:

Things I want to learn/do in relation to Art:

• doodling – been on my list three years in a row now!
• sketching/painting faces – been on my list three years in a row too!
• lettering
• collage
• using my photos with my art
• sketching people in different poses
• drawing trees/wings
• making signs/sayings
• sketching scenes
• large scale paintings/drawings
• using some of the materials I haven’t used in a while: oil pastels, pan pastels, neocolor crayons, watercolor markers, etc.
• digital design – maybe

So when I am designing my art projects, I am thinking about these things.

for health stuff I am thinking about:

• pilates
• yoga
• weights
• incrementing daily steps
• no sugar

For thoughts posts,  I am thinking about posting around:

• Learning: I plan to take classes/learn more regularly next year, so I’d be sharing these.
• Coaching: Some exercises, thoughts, learnings in the coaching area
• Listen: this is my word for next year so these would be insights/intentions around my word
• Getting things done, being organized, just random thoughts from that day, etc.

Also thinking about:

• volunteering more. 
• building community again (this is a struggle for me.)
• gratitude
• whether i want to sell my art
• whether i want to videotape while doing art
• what classes i might want to take to learn new things
• maybe David and I can learn together for his project with me
• what can i do with Nathaniel? Maybe something that practices reading or writing?
• how can i organize my projects so they have a monthly theme within the yearly project?

As I was journaling yesterday morning, I realized a distinction that’s become interesting to me. I noticed that, for me, there are two kinds of Joy. Real-time and in-retrospect.

Real-time joy is joy I am feeling in that very moment. I feel this when I am hugging my kids or we’re all laughing out loud. When I am making art. When I am driving and a song I love is turned up loud and it’s sunny outside so I have the windows down. This kind of joy comes from a happy experience combined with presence and the feeling of aliveness. The feeling of being in this very moment, feeling grateful, and really just soaking it in.

In-retrospect joy comes in cases where I am not always enjoying the moment while it’s happening but the memories of it bring me a lot of joy. This can happen on vacation sometimes. With little kids and a lot of moving parts, vacations can sometimes we hectic in the moment. But then I come home and I look at our photos and relive the moments and I am swept with huge, deep joy.

This also happens with my projects sometimes. There are weeks when working on the Savor Project isn’t maybe super-joyful in the moment (or even the art is like that sometimes) but it’s always always joyful when I sit down with the album. Deep, satisfying joy.

I think both of them are valuable and add to my life in different ways. The in-retrospect joy helps develop delayed gratification which is an important skill to have in life. It also allows me to tap into joy in moments where I might not be feeling it. I can grab my Savor Project, spend some fifteen minutes and I am guaranteed to feel the rush of joy.

The real-time joy gives meaning and light into my days. If I had no real-time joy, I think life would be a lot harder to get through. With a four-year-old, however, there is plenty of real-time joy, thankfully. Having said that, when he’s not around, I am not always good at this one. And, as I was journaling, I was thinking that what would be good is to have a balance between the two. So that each week (and even each day) is full of both: things that make me joyful right now and things I do because I know they will make me joyful later.

Part of this is knowing what those things are. Identifying them, noticing them. So for the next week or two, I’ll be keeping track of the moments of joy and making a list so that I can then infuse them into my weeks deliberately. As much as I believe in serendipity and being in the moment, I also believe there’s something to be said for life by design (another post for another time) so this is how I start to design mine to be full of joy.

PS: I have a blog post up on the big picture classes blog today. You can read it here.

On Monday mornings my son’s school has an assembly called chapel. The kids all sit on the floor in groups and the parents who choose to show up, sit toward the back of the room. One of the things they do in each chapel is have class reporters come up for each class, first through fifth. One student from each section shares something they did at school that week. The fifth graders do a slideshow on a topic of their choosing.

What struck me this time was the huge change from first grade to third grade to fifth grade. In a matter of four years, these kids go from barely being able to read and write to expressing their thoughts eloquently, putting together a coherent presentation, and adding their own unique voice into their project. The difference between first grade and third is wide and deep and the amount of growth and learning from first grade to fifth is mind blowing.

All in four years.

This got me thinking about my life and growth and learning. I know that we spend the years between six and twenty-one in school and our full-time job during that time is to learn as much as possible, so it makes sense that most of our learning takes place during that period of our lives. But does it really have to stagnate so much after we leave school?

I love learning. While I have my favorites (like languages, art, math, literature, statistics, and psychology) I am always happy to learn anything at all. It’s rare to find a class I wouldn’t love to take. And if you’ve been around here for a long while, you know that I take a lot of online classes. But, sitting in that chapel made me realize that the growth rate I’ve had in the last four (or ten really) years is much lower than I’d like.

More importantly, it made me realize how much we are capable of growing in a short amount of time.

It made me wonder why this is something that degrades over time. Is it just because of time limits? Is it because we don’t go to school anymore so we don’t have to work so hard at it? Is it that our brains are not capable of such acute growth anymore? (I know they used to think that, but I also know they’ve proven that our brain grows and learns and adapts our whole lives.) Is it that we stop believing we can and just stop trying? Is it that there’s too much going on? Is it that we just don’t care?

I am not sure what the answer is. I don’t even know what it is, for me. I spent a lot of time learning when I was in my twenties. I took a ton of college courses locally in NYC just for fun. When I lived in Japan, I took daily Japanese classes and when I returned to NYC, I continued them as well as Italian and Psychology, Sign Language, Literature classes and many more. But when we moved to the West Coast, I stopped. I think it’s partly due to the lack of freedom I feel because I can’t drive around as easily as I’d like and partly due to the more hectic life I lead as my family of two became a family of four.

As I sat in that room, I realized how much I missed learning and growing.

(In honesty, another part of my life that I dropped around the same time is volunteering and I miss that dearly, too.)

I know my kids are still a little too young and that as they grow up, some of the liberties I had will come back but I noticed that, like most things, these muscles need regular attention or they atrophy. Since I’ve begun working from home, I’ve become less socially comfortable and taking a class online seems so much easier now than physically going to one. But I know that it’s less enjoyable in many ways (while more practical in others).

I’m not sure what my point is with this post except maybe to share some of my thoughts from Monday morning and the realization that we humans are capable of mind-blowing growth and progress in a short amount of time. I don’t ever want to lose sight of that. I don’t ever want to think it’s too late.

So the big question now is what’s next? I am one year away from forty and I’d really like to make this last year of my 30s count.

How do I bring on some mind-blowing growth?

I have long been a fan of Gretchen Rubin. I’ve read her first book and really enjoyed it and her second one has been in my queue for a while. Earlier this week, I saw on her blog that she was offering a few mini-courses on different topics. I decided to sign up for the Get To Know Yourself Better one. If you read here at all, it shouldn’t surprise you that this topic interests me.

The first email came yesterday and it was about writing your personal commandments. Gretchen’s are on the side of her blog and I always like seeing them. It’s easy for me to copy almost all of them but I wanted to spend some time thinking seriously about these and see what I would have come up with if I didn’t have her list to cheat from. Here are some things that have come up for me already. I plan to add/adjust as I see fit over the next few weeks.

1. Be You: I know this one is similar to hers. But I like Be you instead of Be Karen. I use this phrase on all my art pieces and I have grown to believe that we work best when we know who we are, we accept it and love it and don’t constantly fight it or feel bad about it. It doesn’t mean I’m perfect but if I am being me, fully owning who I am and stepping into it, things are much more peaceful.
2. Choose Joy
3. Savor the Ordinary: Life is a collection of little moments. When I savor the ordinary, I am appreciating my life and living it and really being in it.
4. Be Here, Now: The present moment is the best moment. It is all I have.
5. Listen: It’s much better to listen than to talk. I am quite talkative but I learn more when I listen. I care more when I listen. I am a better person when I listen.
6. Be Kinder than Necessary: seems self explanatory to me.
7. Yes, You Can
8. Do It Anyway: I might be scared but I do it anyway. Be brave.
9. Remember What Matters Most: Never lose sight of what matters most, what I am doing it all in service of.
10. It Just Happened: This is a new one I’ve been chewing on. It didn’t happen to me or because of me. It just happened. Remember it’s real but not true. I will write more about this one, still thinking it all through.
11. Wait 24 hours

So there we go, here’s my first attempt. It was interesting to see how many of them are similar to what I did for my OLW assignment.  I will work on it more and flesh it out and see how I feel. What’s on your list? 

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted a thoughts-post. I’ve been thinking about writing them, even thinking about the content, but I just never seemed to want to make the time to sit and do it.  I promised myself that September would be when I got back to doing these. So here we are. September 3. As good a day as any. To get my feet wet I decided to start with some “right now” thoughts. I figure my word for the year is present, so talking about what’s going on “right now” seems apt.

• Right now, I am really enjoying fresh air. I find myself seeking it and sitting outside as much as I possibly can. I am deeply grateful to be living in California where the weather is outside-friendly for so much of the year.
• Right now, I am reading voraciously. I finished three books this weekend and all I seem to want to do is read, read, read.
• Right now, I am trying to settle into some kind of routine but I have two more weeks before life goes back to “normal” so I am trying to take it all in stride and let myself off the hook.
• Right now, I find myself itching for something new, wanting to shake things up, but not knowing exactly how. I find myself searching.
• Right now, I am still trying to get back into the groove of things. Even basic things like doing art.
• Right now, I am already thinking about 2014. The year, my word, my wishes. My projects.
• Right now, I am starting to get excited about my upcoming class, slightly stressed that I haven’t taught it in a while and hoping it’s still well-received.
• Right now, I am reorganizing my coaching practice and figuring out what I want the future to look like.
• Right now, I am missing some of my friends and their company and making plans to reach out.
• Right now, I am waiting for some news in the mail that’s making me anxious pretty much constantly.
• Right now, I am listening to Sara Bareilles’ Brave on repeat and thinking about what I might do if I were braver.  I want to be brave. Really brave.
• Right now, I am listening to Tara Brach’s wise words. There’s always something new to learn, even when I’ve listened to it again and again.
• Right now, I am loving my kids and my husband so deeply and wanting so badly to be the best version of myself for them all the time. I wish for more patience and so much more kindness. I love them so much.
• Right now, I am looking forward to going to get Nathaniel from school and seeing his face shine when he sees me waiting for him.
• Right now, I’m excited about some happy mail that I know is on its way to me.
• Right now, I am missing my mom and dad and sister and nephews.
• Right now, I am thinking about how to be done with Starbucks. However I can.
• Right now, I am trying to figure out how to fundamentally change the way I eat, the way I look at food, the way I want to live the rest of my life.
• Right now, I am loving the way Nathaniel says human (he pronounces it hooman).
• Right now, I still can’t believe David’s already in third grade. How is it that time is passing so quickly?
• Right now, I am so proud of my husband for how well he’s doing at work and how brave he is.
• Right now, I am tired. I always seem to be so tired.
• Right now, I find myself taking pauses several times a day to say thanks for my life. My imperfect but wonderful-in-so-many-ways life.
• Right now, I am thinking about all the things I’d like to learn and all the places I’d like to visit. I am thinking about making a plan to put both of these in process.
• Right now, I need to clean up my desk. There are several other areas of my house that I’d like to declutter. Where I feel the clutter is contributing to my frustration and nagging me daily.
• Right now, I am really inspired by Diana Nyad.
• Right now, I am thinking of this large gap. And what we all lose because of it.
• Right now, I am thinking about where else in my life I could be doing some clearing. What else needs attention.
• Right now, I am wishing I could be kinder to myself.
• Right now, I know my birthday is coming up and I will be going into the last year of my thirties. I am wondering what that means for me, if anything. What I might like to commit to, think about, shift, aim for, etc for this last year.
• Right now, I am taking Ali’s Hello Story class and loving the stories she’s telling and thinking about whether I’d like to scrap more and whether I’d like to type up my journaling again. About how and where I want to tell our stories.
• Right now, I am attempting to learn how to draw faces. Again. I seem to come back to this one often.
• Rigth now, I am trying to smile more, breathe more, be kinder, and have faith that all is okay.

How about you, what’s on your mind right now?

ps: there’s a giveaway of my class on the my mind’s eye blog today if you’re interested. there’ll be one here in a short while too if I can get my act together 🙂