#DareToExcel Challenge – 7:
Commit to viewing time differently from this day forward. Here are two invitations:
#1 – Draw a new relationship to time: The first one is an exercise that engages your faculties beyond the analytical-rational mind to help you rise above the “good enough” plateau and to dare to excel:
Draw a symbol or describe symbolically your existing relationship to time. What does Time look like? Move like? Feel like in terms of weight or texture? How do you two relate? Then do the same for your desired relationship to time that would let you excel? What does that Time look like? Move like? Feel like?
Share a pic of what you create with us and online.
#2 – Get outside of yourself: What one thing could you do to shift your relationship to time? How could you get outside of your office, outside of your habitual work flow, and do something so seemingly unproductive as to take a walk in the park, bicycle down the road, or watch the sunset for 10 minutes? Okay – don’t just write about it. Do it! Dare you!
- Time is a river, and I have never been much of a swimmer. Still, I always seem to draft into the fast, deep water where I flail and flounder and gasp for breath as I try, often unsuccessfully, to stay afloat as I swim against the current toward my desired destination. It moves too fast, runs too deep, pulls me under, weighted as I am with too many and too much… And yet, near the shore it is slower, shallower, shaded by broad-leafed trees. On the bank, near the gently swirling pool, there is a fallen log where I could rest, and a patch of dry sand where I could put down what I carry, sort through the unwieldy mass of projects, goals, desires I have collected and cull what I no longer need. And there, down the river a bit, is a collection of driftwood, and beyond, a few steps into the trees are vines I could use to lash them together, to create a raft, a rudder, two oars. Perhaps this bag I’ve been using to hold all the once-treasures, once-obsessions, once-necessary evils, can be used instead for shade now that the things I carry can fit easily in the two cargo pockets of my long, plaid shorts.
- The #365 photo project I started in January requires that every day I get up off my chair and walk out into the world. To notice the play of light and shadow on my casita’s clay walls. To let my eyes stray to the shapes of clouds, the drop of petals from a sun-baked flower. To search in ever-widening circles for beauty in all its forms. Some days I search for an hour or more. Some days I simply look out my door. But I do it. Every day. I pause for a moment and smell the flowers or petrichor.