Taking Outward Steps in the Direction of a Dream.

The Artist’s Way.  Unlock your creativity in 12 weeks, said the flyer.

Doing The Artist’s Way with Ros Burton opened my eyes to the opportunities that a lifetime spent working for crazymakers could spell if I would banish them forever and focus on my own creativity.   

But there was more in store

Week 5: Recovering A Sense of Possibility.  There is a real advantage to doing some courses later in life.  You’ve been there!  OK, it would have been good to have done them, twenty, thirty, forty years ago, but I didn’t.  The Artist’s Way was published in 1993 so I could have done it two decades before but I’m a late bloomer, a late developer. So never mind.  

To us also comes a prize

Just as the session on crazymakers leapt off the page and let me end my subscription to the Worshipful Cult of Crazymaker Enablers, Week 5 would validate some decisions I’d taken when I headed for the UDO, my Unilateral Declaration of Ownership, a few years before.   I quote Julia Cameron, “Time and again, I have seen a recovering creative…… take a few outward steps in the direction of the dream – only to have the universe fling open an unsuspected door.”

Wow, I related to that.  In my first blog, I told you about my head-banging moment.  Maybe the universe thought because I was banging on the floor, I needed a big door.  It is absolutely true that the universe flung one open: more than one.

And the feeling was familiar

I’d experienced the sentiment first when I had dug a hole for myself in the early weeks after my arrival in Hong Kong as a twenty-one year old in 1968.  I was hardly a recovering creative then, more like a would-be.  But it was true, a few outward steps was all it needed to open doors and trigger a whole new world.

It’s the butterfly effect.  Big clod-hopping steps have a bigger effect and the thumping of a howling, head-banging banshees bigger again. 

The lesson went on

It explained that thwarted artists can eventually become like cornered animals, snarling at family and friends.  They need to be left alone without unreasonable demands made upon them.

Dear family, see I wasn't mad.  Just a thwarted artist.  Consider it proven when you get to read my memoir about Hong Kong.  I just had to start writing, that's all it was.