Alright folks, git yer game face on. It's starting. Remember my post about the Declaration of You blog/book tour I'm participating in? Well. Here we go. The theme for the first week of the tour is...drumroll, please...
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| illustration by the talented Jessica Swift |
Enthusiasm is a word that actually makes me uncomfortable. (So, I guess this is off to a great start). I automatically picture bouncing cheerleaders and hoards of extroverts and lots of woohooing and tomfoolery. The whole situation makes me very tired. However, if I rework the semantics and sit down to blog about my passions in life...oh, child. I'll be blogging for days. Proust style, never ever leave the room, in the zone. I thought about drafting a mega list of my Big Likes (a'la Jessica Swift); however, based on some work* I've been doing lately, it's actually an important exercise for me to cluster and theme and get all meta with it.
At this very moment in my life I'm enthusiastic about enthusiasm; or rather, I am passionate about my passions. In other words, Captain Redundant, I'm recommitting to their importance in my every day life. Oh, and when I say *work I've been doing lately, I mean to say getting my shit together. And by that I mean to say reclaiming my creative spirit. I've been slowly working on that reconstruction for about a year and a half now. Grad school was more or less an abusive relationship that left me pretty high and dry in the enthusiasm department. Leaving my program coordinator position at work and moving up in the ranks of administration is both a blessing and a curse. There are other factors, but I can sum it all up by saying I've been going through a lot of motions, as it were, these past few years. It's been a slow process since grad school ended in August 2011; but since January 2013, I've been at warp speed. Warp, I'm tellin' ya. Nothing has propelled this getting together of the shit more so than My Happiness Project. Even more than the book itself, the mere fact that I forced myself to be conscious about happiness and to finally check in to my life again has had a massively significant impact. Like attracts like and as I've been tuning in, an entirely new and huge world of creative adventures has been tuning into me. Funny how that works. Like, every time.
In terms of focusing that new and huge world of creative adventures, I've sorted it out to this: The name of my giant enthusiasm umbrella? Creativity. I don't (only) mean DIY blog posts and crafternoons full of fruit trays and girlfriends. I mean creativity in the most literal and expansive sense of the word, to participate in acts of creation.
{Writing}
I never stopped loving and missing this blog, even in the darkest days of grad school when I only touched it once every few months when I resurfaced from another semester. I made a Happiness Project goal to blog once a week, but I've upped the ante. I'm now participating in The Blog Dare.
{Photography}
This is such a part of me and who I am that I cannot imagine a single day in which I don't create at least one (and sometimes hundreds) of photographs.
{Travel}
The deal breaker question when you're talking about your life's passions seems to be: "If money were no object and you could wake up tomorrow to do one thing for the rest of your life..." It's travel, folks. I am never ever more creative than when I'm out of my routine and on the road.
{Community}
I'm an organizer. I mean that in every way, from a radical political sense to a brunch hostess. I'm a Libra who needs partnerships and I thrive in a like-minded community of people who share my energy and passion(s).
Looking back on it, I've actually made all sorts of investments in my creativity over the past few months -- everything from attending Alt for Everyone to purchasing eBooks from Kelly Rae Roberts, Gala Darling, and Jessica Swift, to enrolling in an online photography class to downloading a bunch of Deepak / Oprah mediations. Whatever works, man. I am also ripping through Jen Sincero's book: You are a Badass. It's particularly entertaining to read it on planes and peripherally watch people's faces as they try to accept that they did just see what they thought they saw. In fact, reading it in public is a pretty enthusiastically badass thing to do.
Love,
me
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| follow my Instagram photos at @fourthirtyam |
The Fine Print: The Declaration of You will be published by North Light Craft Books this summer, giving readers the permission they’ve craved to step passionately into their lives, to discover how they and their gifts are unique, and to uncover what they are meant to do!
