Jane and Tucker limited pallet experiment

Sketch a day - Day 145/365

A MAP walk to start the day. It was wet and windy and I enjoyed it, but at the end I felt very tired and uncertain how it could be possible that we had not really gone very far at all. I felt like we had gone miles. We had not. So I am chipping away at my target, but it's not going down as quickly as I would like.

I have to keep reminding myself that it is ok if I do it slowly. I have to reeducate myself over and over again that not pushing myself to exhaustion is ok. I feel sometimes that my whole experience of myself is founded in this idea that I ‘push on’. It's wired through everything I do. So. Not easy to challenge this part of myself. But very necessary. And a gift in and of itself.

Not trying to be perfect is a gift to myself and also a gift to the planet. I keep thinking about that. How addicted we all are to seeing the mess the planet is in and thinking, ‘let's make things better by just repeating all the shit ideas we have always had, but this time let's double down on said shit ideas and somehow that will make things better… ‘. Why do we think this? We are such strange, strange deluded creatures. And yet, there is so much to love about us. One day, humans will make sense. But probably not in my lifetime.

Anyway, beyond the walk and grappling with rampant internalised abalism and perfectionism (be gone, both of you) I did playwriting (today I was wrangling the immense archive of real-life testimony that will make up one strand of the play. It's all so moving and brilliant and the job of editing into this and choosing small sections is very hard. But i am working in sweeps with it. Today I made a kind of long list of initial parts to be ‘in’. It's far bigger than it needs to be, but I began the whittling process.

As seems to be my new daily habit, I started the day announcing that I would finally embrace prioritising healthy food choices. And once again, by 3pm I was telling Jane that I must have chocolate or I might die. It's like at 3pm my internal chocolate gremlins emerge. Oh dear. But this does seem to be the way things go when I am doing long hours of writing.

At the end of the day I did my sketch. I chose a moment where Jane and Tucker were by the lake at St Ives in Bingley. Well Jane was by the side. Tucker was in the lake. I continue to experiment with reduced pallet sketching. I also continue to be very frustrated by it. But here we are. It's done now. And learning to wrangle less as more is important for me.

There's a theme emerging here isn't there!

So a day of imperfect travels over land, page and sketch pad. But somehow (once again perfectionism me gone) I remind myself that it may not feel like it, but I have taken small imperfect but meaningful steps forward. I am closer towards being the walker/writer and artist that I would like to be. Thou realistically I am probably no closer to becoming the regulated chocolate treat consumer I dream of becoming.

That's the news.