I am now caught up, as it is week twenty-five in our fifty week challenge. Half way done, how is that possible? We were asked this week to do something around paper. Not just any paper, the kind of paper that we think is rare, expensive or one of a kind and scares us to utilize it. The paper in this piece is an original gel print I made. I could never duplicate it again…gulp! I then looked up this quote and thought it was a perfect way to talk about the power of paper.
Gulp! You know those moments in life when you have worked so hard to get where you are that you don’t want to flub it up with the next thing you do, gulp!?! The gulp moments! The ones where we are excited and fearful at the same time. When we know we could be fabulous or ruin all our hard work, never to be able to go back again. Paralysis is an option. To sit and wait until we think our skills are up to the challenge, or to forge forward with passion and gusto risking failure at every turn.
We’ve all had these chances, opportunities. When we have looked failure dead in the eyes, stopped dead in our tracks as we are too afraid to make a move and fail. GULP!!! Greatness is not perfection. Greatness is those small steps to keep us moving forward even knowing we will fail…because eventually we all fail. Greatness means being willing to flub it up, dust ourselves off and try again. And again, and again! It means moving forward through all our gulp moments AND seeing progress even if that progress isn’t what we thought it would be.
So here’s three cheers for filling our paper with the breathings from our soul…because that is what it all boils down to. Being ourselves , becoming ourselves and giving ourselves a break when things do not always go as planned. Mistakes, failures, frustrations and triumphs are all part of life. We learn courage, confidence, how to fix our mistakes and how to grow beyond what we thought was possible. The moment we embrace all that the fewer gulp moments we experience.
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