This is a part of a series of photos of objects that have meaning to me. Want to know a little more about the origin of this project? Have a read here.
Fellow magpies, what objects have meaning for you? would love to hear all about them in the comments below.
I also make art. You can things with my designs on at my shop here. Could even treat yourself if you wanted to. Just saying.
A few years ago I took a whole heap of photos of objects that had meaning for me. I had a conversation with a guy I was seeing at the time about minimalism and how he had thrown away all his childhood soft toys, which I just found really, really sad for some reason.
I am slightly suspicious of wholesale minimalism. I feel that some objects come with important emotional meaning attached, and they form part of our emotional memory. Our emotional story. What looks like simple clutter to some people, is for other people an anchor to an important moment, good or bad, in their past. I am sure that sometimes getting rid of those anchors can, in it self, be a very psychologically healthy thing to do. But I am not an advocate of throwing things away simply for the sake of being tidy, of creating a clean, minimalist environment. So (in a grand romantic gesture) I made a digital film for the guy.
It totally wasn’t worth it. I mean super duper wasn’t at all worth my effort. But there we go.
Looking at them again now, I think they made a nice little project. I wanted to share them with you, Fellow Magpies. I will post them over the next few weeks and months, and maybe add in a few new ones along the way.
I also make art. You can things with my designs on at my shop here. Could even treat yourself if you wanted to. Just saying.
I’ve been thinking a bit about what it is I am doing (or trying to do) when I’m writing this blog recently. Looking back over previous posts there are bits and pieces about my art, other people’s art and being creative, and sometimes (but not as much as I initially thought there would be) on trying to sell it. There are bits about being in nature (mostly in the woods), or out and about in lovely bits of the UK, and on appreciating the wonderful things we may have that may often go unnoticed close to home. There are also some thoughts on mental health, wellbeing and some of the tiny steps that may be part of the journey to getting us there. I think for a while I have felt a bit like this is a messy blog with out a central theme, which, while it may suit my messy brain, may ultimately not be of that much interest to other people.
I’ve been looking around at some of the ‘alternative lifestyle’ movements for a while and with each one found that it wasn’t quite for me. I like some of the principles of minimalism, but am far too (proudly) messy to be minimalist. I can see that living a ‘laptop lifestyle’ while travelling and living on a shoestring may be exciting, but I like my home and my friends and family too much to feel like swanning off into the sunset would be my thing. I don’t rage against my day job, which is meaningful and I think involves important work, but I do want to do a bit less of it. I have always been a bit anti-consumerist, but at the same time have a deep appreciation of (and am very happy to pay for) the sensuality and materiality of objects and food that have been made with skill and love. I find some of the writing coming out of the self help movement useful, but find they often promote an approach that for me is uncomfortably self absorbed. I like being with people, but also like my alone time too much to consider some form of communal living to be the answer. So I kind of didn’t really fit with any of the alternative lifestyle tribes that would require quite radical changes to my current way of doing things.
I think I’ve come to realise that the blog is all about me efforts in trying to carve my own pragmatic (and messy) path to living a creative, purposeful, connected, meaningful life. While I may not be a perfect fit with any of the currently available ‘alternative’ tribes, I do think that what I’ve been trying to think about is living a different kind of life to one that is normal and heavily promoted in western culture (striving, ambitious, busy, individualistic, resource and spending heavy). I think that in particular I’m beginning to see the kind of isolation that kind of life can lead to, and how frankly unhealthy that is. There has got to be a better way that may involve slightly softer lifestyle changes. I’ve been pretty inspired while reading the blog of Mrs Craft of Craft and other crazy plans, who seems to be doing all sorts of interesting creative and outdoorsy things and generally enjoying that. And I’ve been thinking about more collective ways of doing things. I think over the next year or so I’ll be posting a bit more about this as I work things out as I go along. We may even start our own pragmatically, proudly messy, creative tribe, together. Would love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments below.
I’ve been thinking a bit more since I wrote about gratitude last week. I feel like a lot things I have seen written about gratitude have a focus on what being grateful will do for you, i.e. how it will make you feel better. How and why we express gratitude to other people is often not really spoken of, but it is potentially far more important.
Wellbeing is closely related to the quality of our connections or relationships with other people. I feel like over our culture has become very focused introspection, on the me, and that can make this easy to forget. We are pushed to think about questions like: How do I make myself happy? How do I improve myself? Our interdependence is not always that evident to most people, and it can be easy to take the things that other people do to help us for granted. It can be relatively easy, in our increasingly individualistic culture, to forget that humans are social animals. We are biologically rigged to work together. None of us every really achieves anything alone.
One of the things I have been thinking about is being mindful of expressing gratitude to other people. In particular in trying to make sure that I am thankful to the people close to me, like when my boyfriend makes me buttered crumpets, or when my sister buys me pink swim fins for my birthday. I think that taking the time to show people you appreciate the small everyday kindnesses they may pass your way is possibly the best form of gratitude practice I can think of.
After writing my post on gratitude on Friday I was able to enjoy a really lovely swim, where for most of the session I had a lane to myself. I thought it was worth a quick doodle.
I wanted to write a quick post about something that has been troubling me for a few days. I was watching a YouTube video the other day that I thought was on personal finance but turned out to be on ‘manifesting wealth’ using the law of attraction philosophy popularised by the book The Secret (have not read it, and I don’t plan to). In this video, (which I cannot find the link to and don’t want to promote anyway) a very attractive wealthy looking woman explained that you needed to behave gratefully and respectfully towards the universe if you wanted to be successful in life. The Universe is basically an authoritarian Victorian patriarch handing out sweeties to the most pious and well behaved among us. Apparently.
For some reason this just really annoyed me. Most of the people I know who are successful have got there through differing combinations of luck, various forms of privilege, and hard graft. Many of them (but not all!) are very grateful for their success, but it was, for most of them, the work that got them there. I think the universe, in it’s infinite beauty and chaos, (and working on the unlikely assumption that it has some form of unifying consciousness) has better things to do that to check in which my savings rate and make adjustments according to my gratitude. I just don’t think it cares. It has better things to do. Like build planets and ignite stars. To scatter about the raw materials of life itself.
Having worked in both psychology and mental health I have also been aware for some time of positive psychology idea that keeping track of the things you are grateful for may help ameliorate symptoms of anxiety and depression. This was also something I was uncomfortable with because when you have anxiety or depression that is disruptive of your ability to do or enjoy things, I think you legitimately have a something to be really pissed off about. Telling people in that situation to sit and count their blessings feels patronising and a failure to grasp the severity of the situation.
That said, since the beginning of January I have actually been making more of an effort to take stock of the things I am grateful for. Things like having a boyfriend who cooks me lovely vegan food when I am sick, or being able to swim outside in the silvery UK sea. I can afford to reduce my hours at work in order to indulge my creative parts, when most people cannot. I have been having fertility treatment for about 5 months now (which is kind of rough) and I have just found out that I have access to more options than I expected on the NHS, and I am grateful for that too. And you know, I have been feeling kind of better lately….
The Magpie at Midnight 