Gentle Focus

No, I don’t mean wipe your camera lens with vaseline…

We are learning much about ourselves, our business, our craft, and so much more during this time.

Fatigue is real at any time, generic or not.

As I have said before, I do emotional triage daily. Sometimes several times a day. Now, more than ever, the self care is vividly crucial.

We see, via social media, what people are doing, and what people are not doing. We can question if we are doing too much, not doing enough, doing the wrong things, and on it goes.

My question to you is simply this: are you being gentle with yourself? Are you giving yourself permission to be gentle, go gently, feel gently, think gently, dream gently, and focus gently?

We, as artists and performers, are in a holding pattern. We are in an extended intermission which can conjure excitement and dread. It can create the extremes of emotion and psychological energy without even trying.

Our tendency is to over-focus; over-produce; over-engage. You know it, don’t you? Or it comes all or nothing with a bizarre abyss in-between.

I have been contemplating the gentleness I can instill in my day. It truly has changed a great deal in how I focus, and how I release. Instilling the gentleness into the day, allows me to learn to be gentle with myself.

A friend and colleague posted the other day that she just took the time to look at the sky all day. She hadn’t done that since she was a kid. The child-like wonder of the sky, and dreaming and stillness re-awakened in her something she had forgotten. That has resonated with me all week.

Perhaps the word “hustle” will leave our psyches to leave room for gentle focus instead. The work still gets done. The commitment is still there. The exploration is still exciting and true. Just perhaps, more gently; more deliberately; most truthfully.

It’s not all or nothing.

It’s something. That something is enough. Go gently. Be gentle. With yourself, and to yourself. And to each other.

With fondness & fierceness,

Susan