Life Goes On…

It is week thirty-six in our fifty week calligraphy challenge, and we were asked to create something to celebrate National Ampersand Day…who knew there was one!?! I chose to write a big ampersand and include within it the different elements of life. Written around the edges are small comments about life. As we all know, no matter what is going on in our world life goes on.

I am not particularly pleased with how this one turned out, it’s messy and I was boggled with creating the empty spaces around the letter. I originally wrote it in orange ink, then went over it in red to clean up the boggles. Hence the mix of red and orange. Once I added the dotted lines and the small bits of text it looked more cohesive. So if I am going to practice the words I wrote…life goes on. Not everything has to be EXACTLY as we first thought, sometimes those boggles help us get out of our own way and go in a new direction.

As I looked back on how the creative process went for this piece, I was reminded of the other times in my life when things did not go as planned. How the idea in my head did not end up looking anything like how I intended it to look. How did that make me feel? How did I handle it? And how did anyone else know? We are so hard on ourselves because we know what the original idea was, and we end up disappointed or frustrated that we ended up with something different. I had to learn to let go of Plan A and be glad that Plan F turned out well. I had to remind myself that no one else knew that Plan F was not always the intended outcome. In other words, let it go and move on. Done is done, life goes on…stop fuming over it.

And as I said, we all know that life goes on. Things progress, everything keeps shifting and moving and we have to be flexible to be able to navigate moving forward. So whatever it is that is driving you crazy because it is not what you originally intended, let it go. Life goes on…