DAY SEVEN

Well here we are at the end of the first week. Only 51 more to go. 
 
In a long project, is it best to focus on progress made so far, or on how much further to go? I suspect the answer to that varies with one's mood and how well you feel the work is going but in the final analysis, I think whichever answer you give would not be as useful as not thinking about it at all and simply putting one foot in front of the other, regularly, steadily, even pedantically if that's the way to get you through.

Ten Eye Beads*. 
 
The risk in that of course is that you may lose sight of the big picture, the thing overall that you started out to achieve in the first place. But again there are different ways of looking at it, in part depending on the kind of creative activity in hand.
 
Think about the painting of the Sistine Chapel, which took four years. There are any number of levels to look at the work, at least if you could get up close enough. Firsts there's the individual brush strokes, patches of blended and overlapped colour used to create a certain effect; larger areas depicting a single character, or part of that character, an artefact or a fold of clothing; and then there are groupings of these larger areas which form a whole scene; and then there the scenes come together to make up the whole ceiling. You get the er...picture. 

Think about knitting - stitch after stitch after stitch bind together to make row after row which come together into a whole. Words, form sentences, which form paragraphs, which form pages, which form chapters, which form books. One bead after another creates the necklace.

In all these cases it's the slow accumulation of small activities which eventually come together into the whole and it is that which in the final analysis, makes the whole. 

So if starting out on anything creative in the near future, try not to think too much about the final product, at least at the beginning. Trying to hold too firmly onto that vision may lead to frustration and discouragement early on if things don't seem to be going exactly as you think they should. Be a little lexible and forgiving, especially at the start. You may be pleasantly surprised with the result.
 
Onwards...
 
 
 
* Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art.




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