If you want to know "who you are" [deep inside], do something different than what you've been doing. It's very interesting...
What I mean is, we (people) seem to be a cluster of habits and interests. Some habits are good for us. Some habits are bad for us. Nevertheless, they are ingrained inside our preferences and muscles ... and our "interests" are those things which 'turn us on' or make us passionate about living.
In my coaching practice, I advocate awareness. This means that we realize what we are doing and what is around us. When we take a step back from our habits and interests, that is, step back so we are on the precipice of not engaging in those activities, we can really see that we crave those activities. When we are aware of our craving, we can set about the task of understanding our habits or interests.
Example:
I have always done creative projects and crafts. Since I was a child, I had always had glue and bits of fluff, and crayons and all those sorts of things. I thought it was part of growing up, and that all children did these things.
As I grew, I attended art college. Yet, while I attended college, I performed shows; it was natural to me to make all of my costumes and create my own props. Then I would create my own "audition" videos, brochures, and continued making my own performance needs. This was natural to me -- and I was genuinely astounded when other performers did do the same thing, preferring to purchase their needs and hire others (sometimes while whining about these vendors) to do their marketing.
I have created my own websites, designed and sewed my own costumes, even made my own props. I created things like a light-up sequined top-hat, sewed a new umbrella-cover, fabricated a 4-airbrush rig. (evidence of my work can be seen on my website: Snake Oil Productions) But I digress....
Recently, I have been focusing on my coaching career and spent little time in my workshop. My paintings have gone unpainted, I have not created performance-marketing materials, and my costume closet has stayed exactly as I had left it. For about 2 years, I have been coasting on memories and past evidence on what I had created - but had created almost nothing myself, save for painting a couple of walls. My hands remained distinctly and achingly unsullied.
Something had been gnawing at me in the interim of my "hiatus". In the beginning, I thought that I could re-focus my energies elsewhere (my coaching career: this needed no dirty hands or bits of cloth, or hours in a workshop). Then I began to feel a bit empty. My life, however filled with happy moments, had little creativity: not the thrill of designing something, the raw joy of shopping for supplies, not the terror of messing up while mid-work, not the burst of proud "birth" after the project was achieved. I was, in fact, mostly just a consumer.
Something in me started dying. Despite all the love and interesting things in my life, I was dying, trying to become "a new creature" (as biblical scriptures had called it) when there were parts of the "old me" which were still serving my heart, soul, and the world... why did I put all my old projects down? A combination of events, all seeming separate but truly, after all was said and done, set in motion to decipher who I really am.
Several weeks ago I started again on a project which I had put away since my divorce: a new painted tire-cover, this one with the design of Botticelli's Venus.
And yesterday, I embarked on a new project with only a thought in my head and the dream of making a little girl happy: I made a flower head-garland suitable for a faerie-princess.I feel a sense of "completeness" when I gaze on these works... completeness inside myself, as if I am able to wring out stuff from inside me which needs to be birthed. Maybe it's oddly prophetic that I am painting the Birth of Venus ;)
This long-winded post aside (and I haven't yet embarked on the idea of ingrained habits), I realize that sometimes it is only when missing something can we find out its true value. It is in that "space", (that open space, that hole that the lack of the thing creates) that we can seek its value.
It is NOT "absence making the heart grow fonder".
It is realizing the absence of something which makes our heart be PASSIONATE.
