May 1 - Change of direction

It's the first day of a new month and I've learned that the approach I adopted for this project isn't working for me. Before I launched into my "Learn Something New Every day" project I thought it would be easy to learn something and create a new artwork from it every day for a whole year. Others told me I was mad but I insisted that it would be easy.

The idea to blog the learning process and then create the artwork from that seemed to be an efficient way to go and, for a time, this was true. Until I got stuck, that is.

In February I was working on a scrapbook album for my Dad's 90th Birthday. Part of it was to produce four pages about his war service and it became a fascinating learning process for me. He fought against the Russians in the Second World War and it had been such a traumatic time that he didn't speak of it until fairly recently. For the album he wrote 12 pages for me and that's when I found out what it had been like for him. To honour his war service I spent a good deal of time on the pages and this halted my work on the blog. Also, I used the work from the scrapbook pages in my "Learn.." book so for a long time it was stuck at that point.

So, by the end of February my good intentions for my project had gone off the rails already and it all got away from me and I started to fall further and further behind with it. So I had to alter the process in some way or give it up entirely.

The solution came with the addition of just two words. In the introduction of my book I've written that it's about 365 things I learned in 2009, to which I've added "and beyond". With these words I've given myself permission to finish the 365 things over a longer period of time, so that's what I'm now going to do. Beginning in May I'll add as many entries as I can for that month, and so on. What a relief it is to allow myself to change my mind about something. It doesn't happen all that often and I think it should become a habit to avoid the stress I put myself under.

Yay! I feel so much better about it now.