It All Begins with How You Think

I have a box that sits behind my work table. It is where I store all my backgrounds from gel printing and ink experiments. It has everything from leftovers cut from finished work, gel prints on all sorts of papers, and miscellaneous tidbits I have saved from other projects. I found this one on deli paper, you know the thing they use at the Deli Counter to wrap meats and cheeses, and thought I might use it for these words from Thoreau:

Thought is the sculptor who can
create the person you want to be.

– Henry David Thoreau, 1862

I was touched by the way Thoreau compares thinking to the ability to sculpt. As if our minds are a solid block which has the person we want to become hiding inside, and the only one who can chip away and reveal our true self is us. It made me think about how Michelangelo “saw’ the statue of David before he even touched that block of marble. Oddly enough, he saw the block of marble someone had relinquished to the dumping ground behind their studio. The other artist thought that block of marble was useless, and left it outside to forget it. Michelangelo saw his masterpiece and had that “useless” block of marble hauled to his studio. It took him years and years to work and chisel that marble into his ideal specimen. The end result still stands in Florence, Italy for the world to admire.

Today may or may not be a good day for you, depending upon what is happening in your world. It could be a day where you are having to chisel and grind out the portions of your life you want cleaned up. It could be a day when you are beginning to see the person you want to be more clearly, now you have to do more work to get there. Or, it may be a day when you are living out your best life, the one you have crafted so meticulously all along your life’s journey. Somehow we are all in process or living with the end result of the work we did before now. Either way, life is indeed like sculpting. We “see” what we want and then have to do the work to get there. Or, once we are there we need to be able to enjoy the results of our labors. Most of the work starts with the way we think and the decisions we make.

What kind of sculptor are you? A careful planner or more extemporaneous? Do you easily make decisions or need to ponder every detail before making a move? Let me encourage you to think about where you are today, and ask you to give thanks for all you have in your life. We are where we have chosen to be, where we have thought ourselves into being. And when we face that the blame game stops, as we are the creator of our own life, our own masterpiece.

One person sees a useless block or marble, another sees a lifelong masterpiece. If you love where you are, keep going. If you have things you want to change, then get out your tools and starting sculpting the life you want…it all begins with how you think!