Shine a light on the dark crevices

One of the lines that Adriene from her online Yoga class says is to ‘Shine a light on the dark crevices’ and she means this for the physical body where many of the organs or muscles of the body are in dormancy and havn’t found much use to feel alive.

Similarly for the mind. We are used to sticking to our regular patterns in our daily lives and there are many dormant areas of our mind that would do well with some exercise.

how easy it is to spend a day getting stuff done…without doing anything meaningful at all. A hypereffective schedule designed to maximise productivity is, in fact, more likely to distract you from what‘s important than help you discover it. - Rob Walker (The Art of Noticing)

Not only is thinking/observing beyond our patterns important, but its also fun. It wouldn’t be wrong to say our routines cripple our observations and the biggest downside of it all is that we miss beauty around us. Day in day out we keep strengthening the same thought patterns and wish we could have breakthroughs of creativity by force.

In his wonderful daily blog Seth mentions:

Wandering around in a digital swamp is a pretty common way to spend an hour these days. Alas, most of us would never consider doing this in a forest. Walking over to a tree because it looked sort of interesting, standing there for a minute, then wandering away. Tree after tree, for hours. - Seth Godin

Good ideas can be planned, great ideas have to be allowed to happen And wandering into seldomly used parts of our mind is a good way to start.

Goals & Spontaneity

There are two ways of animating in 2D. The pose to pose method and the straight-ahead method.

The pose to pose method is blocking in all the actions that are going to happen overtime, like checkpoints through the over-arching action. Straight-ahead is going one frame at a time just relying on the earlier frame for animation, largely not knowing the direction one is going in.

The method that is most used by animators is a hybrid one. Where checkpoints (keys) are made but are not set in stone. This way one gets the organic flow of straight-ahead and at the same time is not entirely blind to where one is going. Result is, beautiful, lively animation that sticks to the available time.

This goal - spontaneity relationship is as necessary in life as in animation. Goals or checkpoints are important but not at the cost of sucking out novelty in living and exploring possibilities. There always has to be a small amount of flexibility in our goals so as to allow for magic to happen when it comes out of spontaneity. One can plan for the good things, great things can’t be planned, they have to be allowed into our lives by making more room for them.

Leaving identity behind

Theres a great difference in knowing what is right and doing what is right. There are incredible amount of books with beneficial wisdom, films that can change lives and advice from well-meaning and well-informed friends that go to deaf ears when it comes to actual implementation. We value learning but are terribly skeptical of applying learnings to our own lives. The rigidness of our identity becomes our true weakness.

Applying a new learning to our lives is a risk worth taking, not taking it, is in fact more dangerous. The raging identity overzealous in guarding its boundaries needs to take a break. Taking ourselves out of our own way makes us into more wholesome beings and not regurgitations of what we were all this while.