After a year's work, I find it helpful to look back and note achievements, losses, important contacts made and steps taken. Because so many of us view 2016 as a year of losses, I'm keeping my missed opportunities in my back pocket and instead sharing some favorite moments and memories in my creative life. Highlights:
I highly recommend taking a moment to recount successes, losses, connections and steps made at the end of a year. There were a lot of 2016 wins I'd forgotten. Remembering bits of failures motivated me, too, while listing goals for the next two years. I've gotten in the habit of numbering a big batch of potential goals for my personal, creative and professional life every year. Then I pick three from any category to focus on over the next two years. Smaller lists inspire more results from me than exhaustive ones. 3 Big Goals for the Next Two Years:
As for the New Year's resolution route, I've decided to set the intenion to invite joy into my creative, professional and personal worlds. This used to be an easy quality to inspire in me, when I felt writing and theater saving my life in palpable ways. That energized me with enormous vitality in the creative process.
However, as projects and jobs and responsibilities piled up, overworking habits, panic and grief made it easier to get overwhelmed by whatever I was making than exuberant. And I don't want that kind of life. I'm no longer interested in the tense and heavy approach, clutching at my forehead with falcon claws and grit teeth. I realize I'm priveleged and lucky to be an artist. I want to spend the next year kneading joy back into my dailyness. By adjusting my schedule, stripping stress away, treating artmaking as a gift, attending to my life with love, kindness and gratitude, I can give more through what I make without wearing out my well. I'm calling on an attitude shift: to ignite joy. What are you calling on this year? What are you growing this year? What are you inviting? Igniting? Happy 2017.
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Heidi KraayProcess notes on a work in progress. This page serves to invite you into the way I work, with intermittent posts to show you the hows and whys on the whats I make, as well as prompts and ideas I bring to certain workshops. There will also be some raw, rough content found in notebooks written years ago, previously posted on: Archives
February 2021
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