One of my favorite current projects is my little “bead people” peace project. I create little thumb-sized people out o fbeads and put them together with a story I created that promotes peace and tolerance. Although outwardly I am pushing “tolerance and acceptance” for others, the real secret behind this “peace project” is what happens when we create something. Whenever I sit down to help a child or adult create a bead person, we enter that wonderful space of creating. Our worries scatter to the four winds, our score keeping ceases, our problem-solving obsessions take a hike. There is no agenda, no big whoop, just the fun of taking raw materials and shaping them into something nice.
The real “peace” in my peace project is that inner feeling that we get when we create. If we all had a lot more of that, our world would indeed be a peaceful place.
Try something simple. Choose a tiny little project that you want to do. It might be cooking a nice dinner, chopping a carrot, selecting a corner of your house to beautify or organize. Create a nice image of that thing having been accomplished. Then take stock of current reality and either make a list or set of steps to get from one (current reality) to the other (the thing you want). Then do it.
The most important part of this exercise is not in deciding the “what you want” or even the steps between that and the current reality, but what happens to you as you create this thing you want. The process of creating doesn’t really have much to do with what or how we create. It is the feeling you get as you are fully engaged in the creative process. This is worth so much more than even the end result of our project. It seems so sad to me that many of us are so focused on the end result (the creation) that we miss the process of creating that can bring such peace, even bliss, when we let it.
What did you feel as you were creating? Did you give yourself the time to enjoy it? Did your mind stay quiet for a while and let you simply enjoy being and creating? What if you were to spend hours every day in this state? Wow.
The real “peace” in my peace project is that inner feeling that we get when we create. If we all had a lot more of that, our world would indeed be a peaceful place.
Try something simple. Choose a tiny little project that you want to do. It might be cooking a nice dinner, chopping a carrot, selecting a corner of your house to beautify or organize. Create a nice image of that thing having been accomplished. Then take stock of current reality and either make a list or set of steps to get from one (current reality) to the other (the thing you want). Then do it.
The most important part of this exercise is not in deciding the “what you want” or even the steps between that and the current reality, but what happens to you as you create this thing you want. The process of creating doesn’t really have much to do with what or how we create. It is the feeling you get as you are fully engaged in the creative process. This is worth so much more than even the end result of our project. It seems so sad to me that many of us are so focused on the end result (the creation) that we miss the process of creating that can bring such peace, even bliss, when we let it.
What did you feel as you were creating? Did you give yourself the time to enjoy it? Did your mind stay quiet for a while and let you simply enjoy being and creating? What if you were to spend hours every day in this state? Wow.
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