Keep the Good and Let the Rest Go

I’ve been cleaning out my studio by looking through piles and piles of papers. Some are good, some are scraps, and some just need to be looked at from a different perspective. The blue square on this piece was a scrap created with a square paper punch. The blue ink spots were on a torn piece of generic I usually use to test my pen before writing. At a different time they would both have been throw away, I learned long ago to be careful about what gets thrown away.

As we all face going without and living in a contained area, if you are like me you are looking at things a bit differently. The piles of papers in the studio serve as a reminder that I am very blessed. I have enough paper to create art for a couple years as long as I am willing to do with what is at my disposal, even if that means combing through remnants and scraps. At another time I might not have seen these two pieces of paper as potential art, I might have just kept them in a pile and moved on. Glad I looked twice.

Discipline is knowing what you want and making decisions every day to support what you want. Discipline means caring enough to be consistent, call out the bad stuff and reward and encourage the good stuff. Discipline means having the tough conversations and caring enough to say no. Discipline has become an ugly word to many people and yet without it there is really no life at all.

The lives we all lived before this pandemic may never be our lives again. We will be changed by these experiences and hopefully changed for the good. We will cherish the parts of our lives that are important and release forever the nebulous parts that don’t make much sense. The ability to decipher the two means being disciplined within ourselves and with our choices.

We can’t keep every piece of paper there is just not enough space, yet we can be disciplined about regularly combing through the stuff to find what really needs to stay. Discipline is letting the rest go so someone else might be ale to use it within their own world. Maybe today is the day you start applying a bit more discipline in your own world by focusing on what you really need and letting the rest go.