Thursday Thoughts...

"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time".

Thomas Merton

I wonder if there are other things that enable us to lose ourselves and find ourselves at the same time? I think if the word 'art' here encapsulates 'the arts', then most definitely it covers so many things that can inform us of our deeper selves and simultaneously enable us to lose ourselves in whatever the subject is.

So observing or participating in any of the arts can do this I think - listening to music, reading great literature, staring at a painting...you discover things about yourself as you observe; and you can lose yourself deeply in the work.

But his quote holds truest for me with regard to actual making. It is when I am working on something, testing ideas, creating new things, resolving tricky moments, responding to the ah ha moments, trying to bring forth some satisfactory resolution of my concerns or ideas that I truly lose myself.

I go far far away; time alters and I come up for air and wonder where I have been.  

And in that oddest of ways, it is also in those moments that I truly find myself - begin to understand my motivations, my fears, my skills, my strengths, my weaknesses and my frustrations. Those moments when I go "who knew I was a person who would/could do x"?

Here's to making, and finding and losing ourselves.

The sky off the cove at Armadale in 2019... I could get lost in those clouds...