One of the exercises for Week Two of The Artist’s Way involves creating a diagram of the various areas of your life and connecting the dots to see where the deficit lies. This is borderline personal, but I wanted to share it because it kind of cracked me up.
The premise is to see what kind of shape your diagram turns into when you connect the dots. The assumption is that when you first start “the program” your diagram will resemble a sort of spindly, schizo tarantula, with lines all over the place and no definitive order or symmetry. Through this experiment, you then see what areas of your life need a little extra attention and work.
I’m doing pretty good in the departments of Spirituality, Play, Work and Friends. And I’m getting there with Exercise. But Romance: not so good. That’s what we call an “impoverished” area, in Artist’s Way parlance.
Not sure why “Romance” even needs to be a category. I have no desire to work on that area of my life right now (or possibly ever again). So, not really sure if the dot is in the right place. If the dot is at ground zero, but I am not planning to build, perhaps the dot should actually be moved to the outer rim of utter enlightenment–where I have no desire to alter it whatsoever?
Thoughts?
Anyway, according to the great and noble Julia Cameron, who wrote The Artist’s Way and is therefore a personal hero of mine, the goal is to move from “tarantula to mandala” with the diagram. In other words, we’re shooting for a perfect circle here.
I’m not doing so bad. It’s kind of like a deflated mandala at this point. A mandala that got crippled by a fatal blow to the heart with a particularly precise arrow.
