If you’re going to imagine, imagine.

Stop pre-filtering ideas. Stop your mental version of spell check and autocorrect.

Just. Imagine.

You don’t have to do. You don’t have to act. You don’t have to be reasonable, practical, or logical. Not when you’re imagining.

Just let it go. Let it come. Let it play.

When you discover something worth capturing, you’ll know it.

In the meantime, you have to allow it to happen. Filters off. Unfettered. Free.

While I was in a waiting room, a television played commercials. It was noise and my brain ignored it.

Until there was a pause in the audio. Mid-sentence. Total silence.

I looked up to see what was happening.

My attention had been captured.

Sometimes it’s not the noise that grabs us. Sometimes it’s the sudden silence.

Sudden silence: perhaps a tool for us to use judiciously.

I recently walked across a slackline. More accurately, I recently tried to walk across a slackline.

I was surprised by how bad I was. But it was fun for me to try. Even more fun for those who were watching.

Trying something completely new can bring quick awareness to our weaknesses — like balance — but sometimes it can uncover hidden strengths too. (My daughter walked across the same slackline and she was great on her first try.)

* * *

Something else I learned: it only takes fifteen or twenty minutes of practice on the slackline to start getting better.

Often, if we embrace the difficulty and awkwardness for just a short while, we can improve dramatically. The problem is, we don’t usually have the patience to be uncomfortable … even for a short while.

A dear friend was kind to point out that when I recently wrote about gatekeepers, saying, “Odds are, you won’t be anointed,” I had forgotten an important truth: we are already anointed.

That our purpose is deep within us and it always has been.

That because of our many gifts, we have thrilling potential in everything we do.

We don’t need to be selected for a journey; we’re already on one.

H/T: Ajike

It’s too risky to wait.

Odds are, the gatekeeper isn’t coming to pick you.

Odds are, the influential power broker isn’t going to discover you.

Odds are, you’re not going to be anointed, and you won’t be famous to the masses.

But you will be famous to some — and that matters.

The strategy is to focus on the practice. To focus on doing good work. To focus on making things better. To serve the smallest viable audience.

The long shot is just that: a long shot. Planning for the long shot is not a strategy.

If you’re going to ask someone to check, “Is this even?” or, “Is this fair?” or “Is this level?” … you’d better make sure you agree about what’s even, fair, and level.

And there’s almost always some margin of error. Better make sure you’re on the same page about that, too.

Celebrate someone you love.

You can wait until a birthday. Or a special occasion. Or just the right moment.

But you don’t have to.

You can celebrate now. You can voice your gratitude now. You can show your appreciation now.

Whether it’s quiet and private or jubilant and public … put words and actions to what is in your heart.

Don’t wait to do it. Celebrate now.

Remember: learning to pronounce the words is not the goal.

The goal is to sing. Not just to say the words, but to sing them.

Don’t get so caught up in the saying that you forget about the singing.

(This notion can be applied as broadly as you’d like.)

Life doesn’t have a GPS whose voice announces, “You’ve arrived at your destination.” So there are times we may wonder, “Have I arrived? Am I in the right place?”

Only we can answer those questions — and we must be patient with ourselves.

But while we wait for the answers, we can live the questions.

And whether we’ve arrived or not, we can appreciate the concept of “you are here.” That much is always true.

For the past two weeks, I’ve had a friendly wrestling match with a piece of piano sheet music. (My sight reading is woefully novice.) I’m learning a lot from committing to learning the notes as the composer has written them.

Of the many takeaways, here’s one: it’s often the notes beside the expected notes that open up a sound. A slight shift up or down the keyboard and the voices take on new shapes and new depth.

It’s this way with many things. Sounds, flavors, colors, shapes … Just a slight, skillfully intentional shift and everything becomes richer and more beautiful.

Stop worrying about your “best by” date.

You’re good until you expire — and there’s no set date for that.

Not cooking lessons. That’s when someone teaches you to cook.

Cooking learnings: things you learn while you cook.

In a recipe, the word “meanwhile” causes me a little anxiety. The more meanwhiles, the more anxiety.

It’s because meanwhile means that you have to do more than one thing at a time. Get one thing started, then move on to another, but don’t forget about the first thing. Add another meanwhile, and now you have three things to monitor.

It turns out, life has a lot of meanwhiles. That’s perhaps why life can be so challenging: all the meanwhiles.

Another learning: the cleanup sometimes takes longer than the cooking.

It’s this way with a lot of creative activity. The cleanup can be extensive — and it’s just as much part of the work.

Which also means that if you’re the one cleaning up, you’re doing important work in service of creativity (even if it’s your own).

The human body is never at rest.

Even when we’re settled. Even when we’re still. Our blood flows. Our chest rises and falls. Our synapses fire. Our physical selves persist.

We are restless creatures.

How are you harnessing that restlessness today?

Toward what worthy cause are you directing it?

Of the many things art can do, it can ask us to pause with wonder and awe.

The Lightning Field by Walter de Maria — a sculpture meant to be walked, viewed, and experienced — is an arrangement of 400 stainless steel poles, each over 20 feet in height, spread in a grid across a square mile of western New Mexico desert.

With or without lightning, the installation calls viewers to experience and appreciate nature in a new way.

Like many great works of art, it asks us questions and allows us to find our own answers — or to just sit quietly with the questions.

Even without traveling to New Mexico, perhaps just knowing about The Lightning Field will help us to pause with a different kind of reverence the next time we see a streak of electricity spanning the sky.

Sometimes complex problems arise because we’ve overlooked simple things.

Dehydration is a good example.

It’s plain enough to seem trivial: drink enough water. But when this doesn’t happen — through oversight or lack — it leads to an imbalanced body, an imbalanced mind, and all the things that can follow from those imbalances.

Don’t underestimate the power of satisfying basic needs and the possibility for there to be simple solutions.

And stay hydrated, friends.

A friend of mine has put on a few pounds. (He’d like to lose 20 or 30 of them.)

He joked with me saying, “At my current weight, I could just tell people, ‘I recently lost 100 lbs,’ and they’d all say, ‘Wow! Way to go. You look great!’”

People tend to praise us based on where they think we’ve been and where they think we’re going — often more than where we are right now.

Perceived direction has a lot of influence on our perspective.

This excerpt is from a Sculpture Magazine interview. Ann Landi asks artist Bonnie Collura, “How did you go from traditional welding to working with so many diverse materials?”

I love Bonnie’s explanation.

“That was … a result of good teaching. I was a real metal head. I learned how to weld at VCU. When I was a junior, one of my teachers said, ‘You’re getting pretty close to graduating, you need to learn how to build in other ways because you might not have the money to work with metals.’ I thought I should follow that advice, so I ventured into the hardware store and bought what I could afford—sheets of polystyrene foam. I cut it thin with a bandsaw and tried to bend it just as one would heat-form steel. Instead of welding, I used duct tape to hold it all together. That helped me become more autonomous because I could build within my means, which has been a godsend when I’ve been low on funds, and it helps when I have to teach students how to build something ambitious without spending a lot of money.”

Build within your means. Be ambitious amidst constraint. Find a way.

Such good lessons. Thanks, Bonnie.

You don’t need eyes to see and you don’t need ears to hear.

And conversely, there are many with eyes and ears who remain blind and deaf.

It turns out, what we see and hear is often by choice.

You can ship with self-doubt.

You can publish with self-doubt.

You can even present with self-doubt.

We like to feel confident — and sometimes that’s the goal — but it’s not a prerequisite.

Good to keep in mind, too, that we don’t always recognize the value of our own work. What we’ve deemed mediocre might just be brilliant … if we’d give it a chance to be seen.

Thoughts do not always arrive fully formed.

Sometimes they’re just a whisper of an idea.

Or the inversion of one.

Or its cousin.

Some are like a sturdy puzzle that needs solving.

Others are a tender seedling that needs gentle care.

Either way, be patient. The thoughts are there for a reason — even if they’re young and incomplete.

Give them time.