Discovering A Sense of Adventure: Walking In This World - Week 4
Week 4 focused on creating a greater sense of freedom, open-mindedness, self-acceptance, and self-expression.
We have been traveling for the last few weeks and have had a pretty busy schedule, so to maintain a presence on the trip, I decided to work through Week 4 over the course of two weeks instead of one. Part of the week’s tasks were completed during travel and others I held off until we returned home.
First time riding an E-bike. This is the moment I realized I need one.
Tasks
1. Draw Youself to Scale - For this task, the ask was that you purchase a blank sketchbook and sketch moments from your everyday adventures. Good or bad is not the point. It is a practice in presence and focusing on the worth of every moment.
Since I already carry a small sketch pad with me most places and often find myself doing this anyway, I chose to push myself to do it more often and care less about the results.
2. Allow Yourself to Be - “Secretly I would love to______.” Finish this sentence 10 times, then allow yourself to fully inhabit one of your desires and write about what it would feel like to fulfill that desire.
As with many of the tasks along this journey, I found myself getting hung up on specifics. I took the work “secretly” much too literally and found myself struggling to complete even one. Because I have been doing so much self-work, I feel like none of my desires are secret. Once I dropped the pressure and decided that they didn’t all have to be a secret desire, I began to flow much more easily and came up with a list of eleven, actually.
Allowing myself to be fully immersed in my desires is not a new practice for me. It's something I have been working with for over a year now. To feel how it would feel if my desires were fulfilled. This is not as easy for me as I would like, but the practice of doing it has made me better and better, so this was just another step in my existing practice.
3. Strike Up a Dialogue - This task brings up the exploration of our own inner voices, named here as our inner innovator and our inner conservator. This was another writing exercise in allowing the two sides to have a conversation in writing. The innovator brings ideas up, and the conservator tries to be realistic. The idea is that the two sides carry on a conversation instead of allowing the conservator to shut down the ideas of the innovator. Or allowing the innovator to spiral in free fall as we often do internally. A balance between the two is necessary.
Artist’s Date
For this week’s Artist's Date, I went to the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Pete and I actually went together, but since he was also working while we were on this trip, I got some time alone to wander among works of great artists. Going to the art museum is always such an inspiring adventure, and I love getting lost in their world for a time.
Weekly Walk
I went on several walks over the course of our vacation, mostly in new neighborhoods where we were staying with friends and family. But on one of the days that I skipped my morning walk, we were travelling back to Buffalo from Pennsylvania and stopped in a little ski town so Pete could take a work call. While he worked, I went on a little walk around town. There is something so charming about being in historic small towns. I love old buildings and towns with so much character, something I miss now that I’m living in Arizona.
Once I made the decision to allow myself some grace on this week’s tasks, I was able to really enjoy the journey again. And it speaks to where I am in life at the moment too. Releasing the pressure for perfection and for constant doing and allowing myself to be present, listen and let go.
