Throughout this year, several bloggers will engage in a conversation here and on their blogs — asking questions of each other and responding. Others are absolutely welcome to join the conversation, as well. Learn more about the ladies of Blogversation 2012.
Today’s question — which should have gone up on Thursday, but apparently I did something screwy and that didn’t happen — comes from Eleanor Traubman, Creative Times, @creativetimes on Twitter:
Don’t laugh … or maybe you should … Eleanor Traubman wants to know about the role of laughter in your life.
What role does laughter, fun and humor play in your life? Who or what makes you laugh and brings out the comic in you?
Mikey Freedom Hart's trio played my surprise 40th birthday party in our apartment, and the experience rocked my world.
I opened the door to our apartment and a whole load of people yelled, “Surprise!”
As I hugged people and soaked in my surprise 40th birthday party, I thought John had the stereo turned up a bit loud — but then I made it to the living room and saw he had a live jazz trio set up in the corner.
I squealed with delight.
We do not live in an enormous place. After having owned a three-bedroom house in Ann Arbor, it sometimes feels like college life all over again to share a one-bedroom apartment with my husband.
But John had pushed the dining table out of the way to make room for the Mikey Freedom Hart Trio and I loved how it felt having live music in our home.
It can be an excellent intimate experience to hear music in a small club, but that’s still not the same as music at home. Maybe the closest comparison is the difference between sharing a nice meal with friends at a cozy restaurant versus feeding them a home-cooked dinner.
A few months later, I was talking about the awesomeness of my birthday party with Clint Maedgen, when he was in NYC performing at Lincoln Center with Preservation Hall Jazz Band.
Clint listened to my giddy description of having a band in our living room, and asked how many people were at the party. I thought for a minute and estimated maybe 50 or so.
“I’d play a party for 50 people,” he said nonchalantly.
Um. What?
Yeah, one of my favorite musicians was suggesting he’d play a living room show.
That led to the surreal experience of collaborating with friends with a bigger living room and a grand piano to host Clint Maedgen and Helen Gillet:
I’m a pretty assertive girl but I’d have never asked a full-time musician to fly up from New Orleans for a private party. At least not without having much deeper pockets. But as we talked about plans, Clint told me how much he loves the intimacy of performing in people’s homes.
“I love the idea of doing living-room shows more than anything,” he said. “Preservation Hall is close to that. “In a lot of ways it could be the future of live music. The idea is that you have a really good friend, a fan of your music, and they used to live here but now they’ve moved to Portland, and they’re telling their friends about their New Orleans experience but don’t know how to describe it. It might be a situation where I can go up and play a house party for them and they can have 50 of their friends in the house, in their living room.
“To get your song across when everybody’s on the couch and kids are running around, that’s my favorite. I’ve done a couple, and it’s fun.”
Emboldened by the Helen and Clint show, I approached Mark “Mr. B” Braun, one of my favorite old-school pianists. I sent him photos and video of Clint and Helen playing and asked if he’d want to do a living room show in Brooklyn.
He said yes!
Mark told me something almost identical to what Clint had said, that he loves playing in living rooms because that’s how he grew up hearing music and it’s an intimate environment that’s different from a club or other professional venue.
(University of Chicago economist David) Galenson points out in his study “Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.” Yes, there was Orson Welles, peaking as a director at twenty-five. But then there was Alfred Hitchcock, who made “Dial M for Murder,” “Rear Window,” “To Catch a Thief,” “The Trouble with Harry,” “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” and “Psycho”—one of the greatest runs by a director in history—between his fifty-fourth and sixty-first birthdays. Mark Twain published “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” at forty-nine. Daniel Defoe wrote “Robinson Crusoe” at fifty-eight.
And a recent Harvard Business Review article caught my eye with the headline, “Why Older Entrepreneurs Have an Edge.” It, too, quotes Galenson as a source, discussing creativity and innovation spiking later life for some.
In his study of artists, University of Chicago economist David Galenson has shown that genius clusters into two categories. Conceptual geniuses tend to do their best work while young, producing breakthrough ideas early in their careers. But experimental geniuses, by contrast, need a long period of time to reach their peak, moving forward by trial and error, slowly accumulating the elements that will be integrated into their fully realized work.
Later entrepreneurship often crosses paths with yet a third later-life trend — the urge to give back. Research shows that half of those who want to become midlife entrepreneurs — more than 12 million people ages 44 to 70 — also want to meet community needs or solve a critical social problem at the same time.
So if you’re Mozart, maybe you’re a prodigy who cranks out amazing works of genius while everyone else is playing hide and seek. But for those whose inspiration come from life experience, gray hair and wrinkles might be a sign we’re hitting our stride.
Do you feel your life experience is fueling your fully realized work? Or do you see your best years in your rear view mirror?
Throughout this year, several bloggers will engage in a conversation here and on their blogs — asking questions of each other and responding. Others are absolutely welcome to join the conversation, as well. Learn more about the ladies of Blogversation 2012.
Lesley Ware asks today's Blogversation question about your work environment
For as long as I can remember I’ve always been hugely sensitive to the look and feel of my workspace. Lighting, sound, artwork, the chair, and sometimes even what’s around my feet all affect my mood and ultimately my ability to get stuff done.
In less than two weeks my family will be moving to another Brooklyn abode and I’m excited about having a new dedicated creative space for work. To prepare, I’ve been collecting swatches, magazine pages, paint chips and pinning inspiration on Pinterest. (http://pinterest.com/lesleyw/space-is-the-place/).
I know responses will vary based on if you work from home or an office building but I’m curious to know:
How do you set the stage for your personal workspace? Do you go for a conservative or creative office space? How does space affect your creative expression? What are your top must-haves for a blog-friendly work environment?
One of my favorite blogs, Zen Habits, recently had a blog post that inspired me to share it here — and to supplement it with my own story about letting go of the illusion of control.
‘You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.’ ~Friedrich Nietzsche
I’m going to share a productivity, planning and organizational hack that will change your life. It will yield some unpredictable results, but if you approach it the right way, it could bring some of the most amazing work of your life, along with freedom, joy, exhilaration.
What’s this miraculous hack?
It’s a simple one: let go. Let go of control and allow yourself to be swept away by the powerful currents of life. Let go of planning and embrace not know what will happen. Let go of productivity and be open to new ideas, new opportunities, spontaneous creativity.
The Case for Chaos
Consider what we’re doing when we plan our day, our week, our year: we are trying to exert control over life, and predict with our plans the course our lives will take today, this week, this year.
We are saying: this is what I’m going to do today. This is how things will go. If I get these things done, life will be good. This is my idea of what this day will hold.
Now consider this: we have absolutely no idea if any of this is true. We cannot predict the future with any kind of certainty, and the idea that we can plan based on these shaky predictions is a nice fiction, but a fiction nonetheless. We do not know what will happen today, much less the rest of the week or month. Knowing what will happen this year? What a crock!
And consider: what if we could know? What if we could accurately predict every single day, and plan each day exactly? Would this be a great thing? I submit that it would suck infinitely more than not knowing. Having foreknowledge of the future means we know what will happen each day, which means not only will our days be ridiculously boring, but we’re stuck on one unshakable path. Foreknowledge means a crazy lack of freedom.
So we don’t know what will happen, nor should we want to. We can try to plan, but those plans are not based on real knowledge and probably won’t happen, so planning is a waste of time.
What can we do instead of trying to predict what will happen, instead of planning? Learn to embrace uncertainty, and be open to change. Learn to let go of control, and surf the ever-changing wave. Let unpredictability rule, let randomness be the force of our life, let spontaneity be the rule.
Embracing Chaos for Good
Some random thoughts based on my experiments with letting go:
Work is better with chaos. While the idea of having peaceful order to our workday is a nice one, it’s an illusion. And it’s frankly boring. Work based on fun, play, and spontaneity is more interesting. Imagine a project that is started with a spontaneous idea, and then changes course as you do it, embraces the ideas of strangers, ends up in a fantastic new place you could not have possibly foreseen when you started. This is how I did my last book, The Effortless Life, and it was one of the most fun I’ve ever had on a project. It’s how I’m doing all my projects now, actually.
A year that isn’t planned. When I started Zen Habits in 2007, I had my year planned out in detail, with goals, actions and weekly plans. That, of course, was tossed out the door as soon as I started writing Zen Habits and meeting my first readers, who changed my life with their feedback and kind attention. My life was turned upside down, my plans became meaningless, and I learned that while life is unpredictable, that unpredictability can bring some amazing things.
Be open to new possibilities. I learned, that first year of Zen Habits, to be open to new opportunities. Time and time again, new doors opened for me that I didn’t know — couldn’t know — would even be there. I saw the new door opening, considered it, and went in. That happened repeatedly, and taught me that there is no way to plan a path when you don’t know what each step will bring, what changes will happen to that path as you walk along it.
Be open to strangers. Let’s say you plan your day rigidly. You’ve got your productivity system honed, you’re cranking out the tasks. You are a productivity machine! But now you randomly happen upon a stranger who says hi. You say hi back, and now you have a new opportunity: you can talk to this stranger, get to know him. But then you’d deviate from the plan! Do you stick to the plan, or talk to the stranger? Well, sticking to the plan would be more productive, and give you more control over your life. But if you talk to the stranger, you might make a new friend. You might learn something you’d never have learned otherwise. I’ve made some of my best friends like this, because I was willing to deviate from my plans and talk to a stranger.
Chaos is creativity, and creativity is chaos. They are the same thing. Creative work doesn’t happen by plan and control. Sure, some of the worlds creative geniuses were detail freaks, but they didn’t make a plan to come up with a creative genius idea — it came to them because they were open to random thoughts, explored paths no one else had thought to look down, took an idea they saw from someone else and twisted it in a new way. Creativity comes from a place of chaos, and it’s only when you open yourself to this lack of control that you can come up with your best creativity.
Some things to read: Two of the best books I’ve read recently embrace the idea of uncertainty, and they also happened to come at me from two of my best friends — both of whom I met almost randomly on the Internet. My friend Jonathan Fields wrote Uncertainty, and it’s a great exploration of some of these ideas. My friend Mary Jaksch sent me a book the other day called Bring Me the Rhinoceros that is an excellent use of Zen koans to explore similar ideas. Both books highly recommended.
When we let go of our expectations that others will make us happy, we enjoy them more. We get angry and frustrated at people because they don’t act the way we want them to. We expect others to try to make us happy, to go out of their way to give us what we want. This is not why other people exist. When we let go of these expectations, we accept people for who they are, and learn to appreciate this uniqueness.
If you don’t expect things to go as planned, you are open to the unplanned. Something might arise that is unexpected, and if you go with it, you’ll have to let go of your previous plans. This can be a wonderful thing. Many people (including the old me) get frustrated when new things come up that were unplanned, when plans go awry, but it doesn’t have to be frustrating. Just expect plans to change, or don’t really plan at all. Expect unplanned things to happen, and when they do, smile.
Embrace not knowing what will happen. This is the ultimate freedom. You don’t know what you’re going to do today, nor what will come up. You are locked into nothing. You are completely free to do anything, to pursue any creative pursuit, to try new things as they come up, to be open to meeting new people. It can be scary at first, but if you smile when you think of not knowing, you’ll soon realize it’s a joyous thing.
When you’re not focused on one outcome, you open the possibility for many outcomes. Most people are focused on specific goals (outcomes), and relentlessly pursue that outcome. They then dismiss other possibilities as distractions. But what if you have no predetermined outcome? What if you say that anywhere you end up could be good? You now open an infinite amount of possibilities, and you’re much more likely to learn something than if you only try to do the things and learn the things that support your predetermined outcome.
‘It’s a cruel and random world, but the chaos is all so beautiful.’ ~Hiromu Arakawa
You don’t need permission to reprint any article on Zen Habits — this entire blog and all my work is uncopyrighted.
Throughout this year, several bloggers will engage in a conversation here and on their blogs — asking questions of each other and responding. Others are absolutely welcome to join the conversation, as well. Learn more about the ladies of Blogversation 2012.
When things become overwhelming, how do you find balance, cope, or just plain get through it?
Jennifer Worick asks a question that I think will sound familiar to all of us -- about how you cope when you get overwhelmed.
I’ve had three massive deadlines. I wish I could say they were back to back but they overlapped, because I clearly have a hard time saying no. And this has led to me working until I go to bed, finding myself unable to sleep because of a racing mind, snapping because of a short temper, indulging in my victim/martyr complex, etc. So I have been trying different things: focusing on one task at a time, focusing on just what needs to be done today, meditation, massage, baths, isolation, etc.
So I’m asking this question in hopes of finding some kindred spirits, but also some concrete strategies to find balance during this lopsided period.
Brook Eddy founded Bhakti Chai after a trip to India taught her to love spicy chai tea
Brook Eddy went to India looking for inspiration. She got it, just in a different way than she expected.
In India, Eddy fell in love with chai — spicy, sweetened tea served with milk — and today her Colorado-based Bhakti Chai is approaching $2 million in sales and Bon Appetit magazine namechecked Bhakti in naming Boulder America’s Foodiest Town in 2010.
The path to tea mogul was challenging and unexpected.
The divorced mother of twins had no background in manufacturing, and her experience in food was limited to small-scale catering. But she trusted her heart as her chai business grew from a hobby to a multi-product line with 16 employees.
In 2002, made plans to go to India to pursue her writing passion. She applied for a $10,000 Lange-Taylor grant through Duke University to research Swadhyay villages, while her photographer brother took photos for a creative collaboration on the experience.
“I had faith it would all work out. I felt like I’d been working since I was 15, finished undergrad in an honors program, went to grad school, and started to work full time two weeks after graduation,” Eddy recalled. “So I did feel like I deserved to take three months and travel – and did think that the trip would on some level lead me to my next opportunity.”
Off she went, halfway around the world, to pursue creativity and experience a totally different culture.
“India was like going home. I’d never been there before, but some part of me had been there and resonated with the sights, sounds, smells, chaos, colors, vibrancy. I learned so much about my inner strength and my inner voice in India,” Eddy recalled. “It was also the first time I had ever traveled with my biological father and brother. I did not know them growing up, so it was a beautiful opportunity to get to know them better.”
Eddy found she hadn’t been chosen for the Lange-Taylor grant, which left her searching for the next thing, but still committed to writing a book, using the inspiration and stories she collected in India.
Meanwhile, she’d also returned from India with a taste for the Indian spiced tea the way it’s authentically served there. She looked around when she returned home and couldn’t find a product that was spicy enough or fresh.
That had pushed her to the kitchen to make her own. She started by making a traditional chai recipe and added fresh ginger and black pepper. It took about four months in 2005 before she felt she’d hit on the right proportion of spice and sweet, for a fresh-tasting tea.
In 2006, she was writing a story entitled “Bhakti Trampoline” at a coffee shop in Boulder and was wishing she could sip on her homemade chai while she was writing and not the watery, preservative laden, spice-less chai they served. She asked the cafe owner about trying her chai.
“They had a sample the following week and signed up as my first customer. This is when I remember walking out of the cafe thinking, ‘Do I really want to start a chai company?’ I thought about this and that yes, I could actually rock a chai company and make extra money and have my chai more readily available for my consumption in Boulder,” Eddy recalled.
Bhakti Chai has some of the most beautiful labels you'll see. It's not just the tea that's inspired by India. Look at those colors.
She launched her business with the name “Bhakti,” which means devotion through social action. She came to understand this meaning from the Swadhyay movement, which she studied while in India.
“When the chai company came to me, it was only natural to build it around Bhakti. I knew I could create a company that was profitable, sustainable, and that invested in social change. I always was so confused why companies couldn’t do all three,” Eddy said. “Now, we hear about triple bottom line companies and the three Ps – People, Planet, Profit – but then it was me thinking, ‘why not? Why not build something meaningful while providing an interesting fresh product reminiscent of India.’”
On the Bhakti website, Eddy tells the story of her learning about Swadhyay movement, including:
“Devotion shouldn’t just be an introverted experience but should be a social force fostering universal family. Societal transformation then derives from this ideal of universal respect and unity, compelling individuals to serve their community by donating two days a month for the good of their community. “
“We started very small,” Eddy told the Denver Post. But, “as we grow our giving grows.” In 2010, Bhakti donations totaled 25 percent of net income, going to groups like the Global Fund for Women and Colorado Youth Matter.
Eddy stayed committed to this business philosophy even after she and her husband divorced in 2007 and she faced supporting her kids as a divorced mother, along with the common challenges of underfinanced start ups.
“The hardest part was being hand to mouth for a long time and feeling so on the edge of not making it due to cash flow issues and not having any investment or loan money for the first two years,” Eddy said. “Banks would not touch us because all they looked at was my credit score. I kept trying to get them to look at our P&L and balance sheet, but they wouldn’t. Didn’t even care how successful we were, only wanted to know my social security number and my assets — which were none.”
Since she couldn’t get traditional funding through banks, Eddy told Reuters, she reached out to her network for funding.
Bhakti Chai was experiencing growing pains in the form of cash flow shortages as increasingly larger accounts put in ever-larger orders, sometimes taking more than a month to pay. After failing to secure bank loans, Eddy drew on her development skills to drum up support from local investors, eventually raising a total of about $250,000. She also tapped Boulder’s enthusiastic network of food entrepreneurs, who were eager to help fill her void in business experience by giving freely of their time.
“It was also hard because I felt alone for the first couple of years – but now I have a great team of employees, advisors, investor members and consultants which makes me feel more balanced and supported.”
Bhakti's newest product line are these ready-to-drink chai blends. I'm a dirty chai addict so I love the coffee blend. It sounds weird but coffee and chai are delicious together.
That team has helped put Bhakti on a growth path that includes now making chai ice cream, as well as beverages both for consumer and commercial channels. They recently launched a ready-to-drink line of products — bottled already blended with soy milk — in three new Whole Foods regions, adding 80 new stores in Texas, southern California, Arizona, Nevada and Louisiana, as well as Portland and Seattle.
Running a company that’s doubling its sales each year while caring for 7-year-old twins is a juggling act, but Eddy says her children feel part of Bhakti.
“They already have so much pride in Bhakti and in me. Every time we go to Whole Foods they love to tell the check out person that their mother started Bhakti Chai. The reason is that they always get such a fabulous response and they smile so wide feeling like a little celebrity themselves,” she said.
Learn more about Bhakti:
Blogging disclosure: I am rarely unbiased about anything I write about. Think of Newvine Growing as my version of Oprah’s favorite things. In the case of Brook and Bhakti, we’ve been friends with Brook since she worked with my husband, John, more than 10 years ago at Michigan Radio. She’s given us her spicy tea several times. I approached her about a profile several months ago and she offered to help sponsor my blogging efforts, but did not ask for nor did I offer editorial control over what I would write.
Throughout this year, several bloggers will engage in a conversation here and on their blogs — asking questions of each other and responding. Others are absolutely welcome to join the conversation, as well. Learn more about the ladies of Blogversation 2012.
Today's question comes from Lauren McCabe, Mermaid Chronicles
This is what I compare my perfectionist tendencies to: a pond on a beautiful day. The clouds shine, the water shimmers, and as I wade around and around in this beautiful, stagnant hole I go absolutely nowhere.
This is what I compare my perfunctory tendencies to: a wild, racing river. The water rushes down crags, water falls, and valleys. It pours and roars, moving fast, onward through the next wild piece of land, going everywhere.
Perfectionism is about staying back, revisiting and revising.
Perfunctory is pushing forward, doing what needs to get done simply, mechanically so you can go and go and go.
Perfection is at the top of the charts, being perfunctory is somewhere in the middle.
This is my question: How do you balance perfection with getting things done? Is it better to be perfect or perfunctory? What do you think?
So many people have already written smarter, better informed pieces about Whitney’s rise and fall than I could ever hope to touch, so I’ll just point you to a few:
Instead, since creativity is one of the topics I write about often, I’ll touch more generally on the painful correlation between creativity and drug abuse, often tangled up in depression or other mental health issue.
Creative people are often highly sensitive to sensory and emotional input.
In her book The Highly Sensitive Person, Elaine N. Aron Ph.D. comments, “It is not surprising that artists turn to drugs, alcohol, and medications to control their arousal or to recontact their inner self. But the long-term effect is a body further off balance.”
In her article Weed Girl, Belinda Housenbold Seiger, PhD, LCSW writes about a client of hers she calls “Weed Girl” who “never learned how to cope with her own busy mind.
“Many gifted adults grow up doing exactly what Weed Girl learned to do, that is they learn how to ‘numb and dumb,’ their passion and sensitivity by smoking pot.”
It seems to me that we like to romanticize the tortured artist and the hard-partying musician — from Van Gogh cutting off his ear to the nutty portrayal of Mozart in the movie Amadeus, we have a long history of loving the story of the off-kilter creative genius.
Meanwhile, many creatives I know, from writers to musicians to artists, first turned to their art as a way to cope with some pain they felt. And since it’s incredibly challenging to make a living from the arts, it’s logical that only those most compelled to create would stick with it. The sensible ones would opt out of the poverty and rejection, leaving perhaps a higher percentage of people compelled by their demons to create.
Scientists have long studied the link between creativity and mental illness, and the lines between the two are often blurred. Studies suggest that creative people often share more personality traits with the mentally ill than “normal” people in less creative pursuits. One Stanford University study compared patients with bipolar disorder with a group of healthy people. They found that graduate students in creative disciplines shared more personality traits with the bipolar patients than with their healthy but less creative peers, according to a study published last year in The Journal of Affective Disorders.
But.
Maybe we need to acknowledge our societal complicity in this pattern. We need to stop acting like it’s a noble part of creativity to be depressed or addicted or self destructive. While we’re at it, let’s not treat it like a joke when a talented woman sings about resisting rehab when she clearly needs it.
And creatives, I know some of you who are pretty darned together — some of you who run and others who’ve given up alcohol, you have steady jobs and pay your bills and also happen to be enormously talented. It’s OK, I won’t out you. But trust me, folks, they’re out there and they do great work.
I have known and loved addicts, so I’m all too familiar with the painful truth that no one can help them until they want to be helped. This isn’t about rescuing people who prefer the path they’re on as much as not enabling or encouraging destructive behavior.
Maybe there’s a chance that if we stop romanticizing the tortured artist, instead of fueling the next Whitney or Michael or Jimi or Kurt, maybe we can offer support in choosing a different path.
Have you listened to the lyrics of Whitney’s “One Moment in Time” lately? So, so sad now that she’s gone. Who’s next?
Each day I live I want to be A day to give The best of me I’m only one But not alone My finest day Is yet unknown
I broke my heart Fought every gain To taste the sweet I face the pain I rise and fall Yet through it all This much remains
I want one moment in time When I’m more than I thought I could be When all of my dreams are a heartbeat away And the answers are all up to me Give me one moment in time When I’m racing with destiny Then in that one moment of time I will feel I will feel eternity
Throughout this year, several bloggers will engage in a conversation here and on their blogs — asking questions of each other and responding. Others are absolutely welcome to join the conversation, as well. Learn more about the ladies of Blogversation 2012.
The Blogversation kicked off a month ago and in case you haven’t followed the conversation, this is a recap — like when a TV show opens with that montage that says, “Previously on Friday Night Lights.”
What’s a Blogversation? Each week, I post a question here. So far I’ve written the questions, andstarting next week, the bloggers will rotate asking each other questions. A panel of bloggers all respond, sometimes just a quick note in the comments, sometimes a full blog post they’ll link to in the comments.
I’ve described it as an online salon, while one smartypants called it an electronic form of The View.
You can call it what you want after reading some of the posts so far.
Jen’s story about how she came to blog about her cat’s death was both sweet and funny:
Sometimes I have a bad day, plain and simple, where writing is the last thing from my mind. Like, for instance, when my beloved cat Mac Daddy passed away. I was bereft. When my mom suggested I write about it, I’m ashamed to say I screamed at her over the phone, saying “The last thing I want to do is fucking write about this. My grief isn’t material!”
Of course it was. Rather, blogging about it was therapy. And my dad, a man who is as stingy with his compliments as his money, told me it was, in his opinion, the best thing I’d ever written. I cherish the fact that I got to him, and I access that well of love and grief every time I reread the post. So here it is: Mac Daddy: A Love Story: http://jenniferworick.blogspot.com/2009/01/mac-daddy-love-story.html.
Lauren’s blog post helped inspire me to ask this question, so not surprisingly, I loved her answer:
What does it mean to be good at something? It’s an interesting question. It’s based entirely on recognition from people outside of you, of your performance stacked against everyone else’s. Being good at something is competitive, comparative. You don’t have to be passionate about something to be good at it.
Amy followed:
Lauren, I like that you turned the question upside down. I think I “fail” at many of my “hobbies” because I judge myself. *If I ran faster or further, I’d consider myself a runner…If I could draw a person’s face and it would actually look like them I’d consider myself an artist.* I’m trying to switch my default of “I’m not ‘good’ enough” to really find joy in the things I love to do. Right now, that’s yoga and cooking.
Maria wrote a lovely, powerful response about getting laid off as a newspaper editor, which starts out:
The past year taught me how well I can live on so much less.
For years, I felt like I had to keep working at a decently paying, full-time job that revealed itself to be quite stressful – too stressful – once it was gone.
The reverberation through my household was huge when I lost that job and with it, nearly two-thirds of our income. How will we ever make it, I thought as I wrung my hands.
“You’ll be surprised at how little you really need,” a neighbor told me.
Amy wrote about recovering from her years as a selfish child, including:
It took asking for forgiveness from my family for the “sins” of my past and practicing the mental thought process that taking care of myself isn’t selfish for me to slowly see myself for who I am today and communicating that with my family. I am looking at a beautiful bouquet of flowers on my table that I bought for myself. A few years ago I would have seen that as a selfish act. Now, I see it as a simple $4 way to take care of myself and I’m thinking about who I am going to give them to before I leave town this weekend.
Eleanor offered the wise observation: There was an experience that taught me about timing and trust, about having faith in seeds that I’ve planted.
Lesley shared two resolutions she made and I especially loved how she framed the second:
My second resolution is to practice daily being the type of person that I’d like to meet. The first two weeks of this felt odd (and were a little comical) but its a way to project myself into the future. I’m intentional about this shift practicing for an hour or an entire day. Smiling more, writing daily, being on time, showing extra love to family and friends and spreading positive energy when things are icky are just a few of the things that this new evolving “Lesley Ware” does.
Kim’s answer made me laugh and made me think:
I don’t make them. Perhaps its because I have such a hard time in general with NY’s Eve. SO MUCH PRESSURE! OMG I can barely stand it. Maybe it’s because there is this feeling that every single person around you is having the most extraordinary time of their life that night! And that one day “if you are really lucky” you’ll get to finally have it too!
And that’s the way January starts. All these people determined to “do it differently!” And I feel so undisciplined next to them all! It feels daunting. And rigid. And military like in the way it lands – so I wait it out. Til it’s quiet and less popular.
And come the end of January I begin to ruminate on what “I want to create in this next year” for myself. I don’t call it Resolutions – as that sounds so serious. This way it’s filled with less expectation and more hope.
Eleanor gave a lengthy response about why she sets goals with help from like-minded friends:
Goal-setting and goal-getting is so much more enjoyable and energizing when done in the context of solid relationships with people who know you and want you to have all that is good in life. At this point in my journey, I wouldn’t do it any other way.
Kim got real with how frustrating technology is to her:
Why do I blog? The first question I must ask is “Do I?” I feel as though I’m a “Hiccup” Blogger….I get hit once in a while so powerfully that I just HAVE TO. What stops me from doing it on a semi-regular basis? Technology. I’m not a dumb blond, I’ll have you know, but I have NO PATIENCE most of the time for some of the things that technologically happen to me when I try to blog. Like for instance adding video. What a bee-atch! In fact that’s how I wanted to answer this question. Via video. But I got stopped. And believe me what stopped me would bore you to tears. And that makes me feel like an incompetent boob and once that happens the inspiration drains out of me like a leaky faucet.
When the inspiration stops -then I’m DOA.
Eleanor let us peek behind the curtain, too:
For the two weeks that followed my launch of creativetimes.blogspot.com, I had the writer’s version of stage fright; I barely slept or ate and I walked around with heart palpitations. The idea of being that visible scared the bejeezus out of me.
Lesley posted about how her blog slowly evolved and helped her identify a new direction for her career:
Shifting into the Blogosphere has opened many doors. When my job was eliminated in 2010 I had “The Creative Cookie” to turn to — it’s been a lifesaver. Blogging has enabled me to hone in on my interests and craft my future.
Throughout this year, several bloggers will engage in a conversation here and on their blogs — asking questions of each other and responding. Others are absolutely welcome to join the conversation, as well. Learn more about the ladies of Blogversation 2012.
Throughout this year, several bloggers will engage in a conversation here and on their blogs — asking questions of each other and responding. Others are absolutely welcome to join the conversation, as well. 
