New Chapters in Life
The beginning is always today.— Mary Shelley
How often do you find yourself entering new chapters of your life? They can sometimes appear with a bang, and sometimes you just slide into them.
I have been sliding into a couple of them over the past year or so, and the current one is just now becoming more defined. As my regular readers know, I have been incredibly involved in building our multigenerational home for quite some time now. I’m very happy to report that we have been in for the past 8 months and are living the dream, with only a few items left to tidy up! So, as the ‘building the home’ chapter of my life is winding down, I thought the next chapter would be filled with family and all the wonderful things that come with these four generations lovingly living together, plus calm, leisurely days!
Little did I know that a visit to a small Art Collective in our neighborhood with my dear friend would open the door to a totally different chapter of my life. As I meandered around the shop, I wondered whether my pen-and-ink drawings, which I do most evenings, could find a home in a shop like this.
Well, that started an avalanche of more thoughts, and research, and planning, and designing, and, and, and! The result is a refreshed website and, so far, two galleries that have agreed to display and sell my work! I also hope to add the ability to sell my art on my own site soon, so stay tuned ☺.
I honestly never pictured myself as an artist, despite all my friends and family telling me to ‘sell’ my work. That never felt quite like me, and I never stopped to think about how to go about it. Until I gathered up the nerve to ask the gal behind the counter, on my first day visiting the art collective, how they found and selected their artists. And one long rabbit hole later, I have found myself prepping for my artwork to make its debut in my first gallery!
So, this new chapter for me is filling up with eager excitement and a bit of anxiety. I dove right into the ‘project’ end of researching, planning, and organizing. But in the back of my mind, I was, and still am, anxious and nervous about being so much on display with my work. Will people like it? Will they buy it? And a host of other nerve-wracking thoughts float around too—Will I make enough money to at least cover the expenses? Will I be able to handle the time and work commitments involved? What is this all going to turn into?
But this is where my Zen thoughts need to come out front and center. Be in the present. Nothing is permanent. Do the best I can. Be true to myself. All those woo-woo, trendy platitudes come to mind—hard to implement consistently, but they are still worth some thought and an attempt to master.
New chapters can bring on so much for us, can’t they? Ranging across the full spectrum of emotions and feelings. Perhaps zooming out and looking at them as an observer, rather than a participant, will help us stay on a steadier path. When we can view our new chapters from different angles and points of view, I think it helps us avoid getting carried away down one and only one path.
It’s okay to open a new door, peek inside to see what’s in the room, and decide if it’s right for us. If not, it’s okay to close that door and open another one. Even if we head full-on into the room and remodel and redecorate it, it is okay if we don’t fit into the end product. We'll learn so much about ourselves and others in the process that we can take that knowledge to the next door and see what that one is about.
I suppose the hard part is the attachment thing to the old chapters of our life. If we get so attached to them, it’s hard to make room for the new ones. Hard to look at them with a different eye to see all the possibilities. But maybe all we need is a little reflection and rethinking about how these new chapters can slide into our lives and make them so much better.
How do you slide into new chapters of your life?
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