Art and Detours

Are you someone who likes to plan out moves or do you act spontaneously? What about if you have a plan in place but something comes along to disrupt what you thought you were doing? Is that frustrating, or are you able to go with the flow? What about in your work or creative process? Are you able to incorporate the lessons you learn from one and incorporate into another?

These are some questions I've been mulling over this week. Sometimes I think I have the creative thing handled, I know that there is a process at play and sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to just wait. But real life is another story. Its harder for me to see the process at play, when I'm the piece getting worked on. Its harder to set your doubts and fears aside like you can with a painting that's not working, and trust that it will work out. There are certainly lessons to be learned in the space of not knowing. Maybe it's trust, or maybe it is some new thing you need to experience first, in order to get where this "plan" was in the first place.

In painting, detours without focus can get you in trouble. You can loose yourself in being creative, following one winding road that forks off into another and another until you discover that you're rather lost. But you don't want to be so rigid in your focus that you similarly become lost if you make a wrong turn of the brush or your water jar spills all over your work. It's not always helpful to constantly plan for accidents that could happen either. Rather, to work toward an adaptable and flexible way of being. Because detours happen, and at least with painting, the work is usually better for it.

Comparing how you handle a personal deviation with how you would handle a work one (or vice versa) could be a helpful tool in gaining perspective and having peace around a situation that may have you feeling unsettled. Or maybe just get back to painting ;-)