Reservation for One Please

Sometimes we get value from a single experience. In other cases, it is about having that experience again and again over time.

It’s not even necessarily about a compound effect, as we often talk about when we touch on things we need to do continuously.

It’s about recognizing that some things in life bear repeating. 

For the past ten years, one of those experiences for me has been a weekly Artist’s Date as taught by Julia Cameron in her program, The Artist’s Way.

What exactly is an Artist’s Date?

My favorite description is this:  Artist Dates are assigned play.

We all need to play.

Whatever your creative expression may be, play is a vital part of it. Why? Because ideas are born from it. One of the things that Ms. Cameron teaches is that the phrase “play of ideas” is actually a prescription. When we play, we will have ideas.

 The essential elements of an Artist Date are these:

 1)    They must be scheduled and cherished as a necessary appointment with yourself.

2)    They must be done alone.

From there, it’s up to you. It’s about exploring something that interests you and feeds you. What fires up your imagination and returns you to a sense of adventure?

Over time, they also teach us to resist our resistance.

That has perhaps been one of my greatest lessons. Play seemed frivolous, perhaps even hard for me to embrace. I was very driven, and anything that felt like a distraction didn’t make the cut in my calendar until this.

Why? I recognized that the distraction was exactly what I needed. I needed to fill my well. My inner well. We draw from it all the time, and it is not the eternal spring we sometimes envision.

Ms. Cameron teaches that as artists (and we are all artists), we must realize that we must maintain this artistic ecosystem. If we don’t give some attention to its upkeep, our well will become depleted, stagnant, or blocked.

Here are her words:

Think magic. Think delight. Think fun. Do not think duty. Do not do what you should do—spiritual sit-ups like reading a dull but recommended critical text. Do what intrigues you, explore what interests you; think mystery, not mastery. A mystery draws us in, leads us on, lures us. (A duty may numb us out, turn us off, tune us out.) In filling the well, follow your sense of the mysterious, not your sense of what you should know more about. A mystery can be very simple: if I drive this road, not my usual road, what will I see? Changing a known route throws us into the now. We become refocused on the visible, visual world. Sight leads to insight.

Artist Dates continue to expand my view of myself and the world.

I invite you to try them for yourself and unleash the mystery of their magic.

“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

~Oscar Wilde