I had too many things in my diary.
They are all things I wanted to do, but they piled up all in one place and overwhelmed me. So I have deleted them. Or rearranged them, or cancelled them completely. In the last year I have slowed up considerably. I think it is mostly knee related, and I can’t wait to get a new one and recover so I can get on with things. Everything is connected. Psychologically, and not just physically, the knee has an effect on everything. On my mood mainly… pain is a real downer. Not being able to get to things easily without planning travel and mobility to the last metre and staircase uses up brain power I would rather spend elsewhere.
So I have trimmed things down to the things I have to do, and then the things I want to do listed in order of desirability. I used to be able to do loads in a day: a gallery in the morning, meet someone for lunch, or have a meeting in the studio, then a rehearsal in the evening. That is a week’s worth of activity now.
So something has to give.
My priority is now to find a balance between my home and family, and my studio. Certain aspects of my life have made it easy for me to cancel them, by being a pain in the arse. These days if a thing doesn’t bring me joy, I cross it off the list. If it isn’t completely necessary, it goes. This might be temporary, a thing that gets rearranged, or not. I am currently considering no longer doing quite a few things, just to make life easier. I am doing them often because someone else wants me to. That then becomes an easy thing to say no to.
I didn’t set out to have a rant about osteoarthritis and getting older, but that’s what happened, sort of as a result of looking at my work and deciding what is necessary and what is extraneous nonsense and frippery.
In consequence I am editing, paring down to the essentials… how much can I take away and still retain meaning and coherence?
Of course, while editing and paring down, I still want to create multiples… I want a thousand of these edited, pared down things… does that even make sense?
Did I tell you I was tired?
