"The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year.
It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose;
new feet, a new backbone, new ears and new eyes ...
Unless a man starts afresh about things,
he will certainly do nothing effective."
-- G.K. Chesterton
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| Happy plastic pop-ups 1-1-14 |
"So what do we do? Anything. Something.
So long as we just don't sit there.
If we screw up, start over. Try something else.
If we wait until we've satisfied all the uncertainties, it may be too late."
-- Lee Iacocca
"Tell me something good."
-- Stevie Wonder, "Tell Me Something Good"
Every once in a while, my son Leo comes home from school, or practice, or wherever, in a funk.
I hear the door open. I hear the door slam. I ask the age-old question:
Me: How was your day?
Him: It sucked.
Me: What do you mean it sucked?
Him: It just sucked.
Me: All of it? Come on. There had to be at least one good thing. Tell me one good thing about your day.
He's a tough audience when he's grumpy. But if I press him enough without ticking him off, eventually we come up with something that wasn't so bad. Something not sucky. Maybe it was art class. Maybe it was the bite size Butterfinger bar I hid under the healthy food in his lunch. Maybe it's just the simple fact that school is over, at least for the day.
The frost cracks, a smidgen. He warms up, a little. Life doesn't exactly take on a rosy glow and it's hardly a Hallmark moment, but his outlook seems a teensy weensy bit better.
That's all by way of announcing that I am taking on a new 365 days project for 2014, called "One Good Thing." My goal is to use my art, my imagination, my photography, my writing ... whatever it takes, to cull a single good thing out of every day this year.
It's my fourth 365 days project, of which I am a true devotee. I'm hooked on the dailiness and the discipline required for creating something every day for a year. It's rigorous. It's exciting. It's relentless. It's spontaneous. It's fresh. It's challenging. It keeps me moving forward creatively, in a constant search for what else I can do, or try, or learn, or practice.
As in the past, this year's project is about navigating life. And even though the focus is on "good" things, I don't plan for this to be all about cliches and sunshine and silver linings and changing my attitude and turning a frown upside down. Because if I've learned nothing else from doing 365 days projects, it's that, as Leo so bluntly puts it, some days just suck. They do. I know it all too well. I also know that if I just sit there and wallow in the suckiness, looking out over the bleak, sucky landscape, everything just stays sucky and there doesn't seem to be anything good on the sucky horizon.
Because sometimes there isn't.
Anything good.
Or so it seems.
Sometimes you have reach down, way down, into the sucky and pull out some suck-covered something. And you might not even know it's anything good at first because it's so covered in suck. So you have to kind of rinse it off. Scrape it down.
Un-suck it.
On the other hand, some days simply rain down goodness. Choosing one good thing is like a hungry child being told he can only have one donut, and he has to make up his mind between the sprinkles and the cream-filled and the glazed and the chocolate frosted and it's so damn hard because he's so damn hungry and they all look so damn good. But there's one. There's always one that glistens a little shinier, stands up a little fluffier, plumps out a little plumpier, one that seems to call out in it's little donut voice "Pick me!"
When you can only have one, you tend to savor it a little more, don't you think? Gorging yourself on anything, even good things, can be sickening.
Along the way I plan to incorporate self portraits, as usual. And faces will pop up now and then (Exhibit A: today's photo). I did "A Face A Day" last year (see all 365 of them at A Face A Day 2013), and letting them go completely felt very scary, so I'm bringing them along. But anything else that I can photograph, draw, sculpt, paint, build, carve, print or create in any way, is fair game.
Today's good thing is the hope-filled promise of a fresh start. Because even though I feel super sad about leaving last year's project behind, the first day of a brand new year filled with new possibilities and new discoveries feels exhilarating, like a new adventure about to begin.
I can't wait to get started. This is gonna be good.
