I've seen a lot of lovely images on Pinterest recently, illustrated words, words that make you stop and think. Initially I have to admit I thought this kind of thing might be a little cheesy (I have a real bee in my bonnet about all those awful 'Keep Calm and..." posters! I swear if I see one more I'll headbutt my macbook screen!), but as I saw more and more really good quotes, or short poems, or interesting words - some illustrated beautifully or with great humour - I realised that there's nothing wrong with a bit of good advice, or just something to make you pause for a moment and go 'hmm... I never thought of it like that before'.
I've been a reading a little about the 12-step programme set up by Alcoholics Anonymous recently - actually in a book entirely unrelated to alcoholism - because these ideas can actually be applied to any repetitive, damaging, compulsive behaviour (not just the usual addictions). The first step was to admit surrender, that you can't control everything in your life (in my case, I was trying to control my feelings and control situations and other people) and I thought it was such a fantastic idea that if you try to hard to control something, it ends up controlling you. If you try too hard to control your emotions, bottle them up, push them down, they start to control you, and the stress of denying your feelings starts to work negatively on your body without your control at all. Anyway, I thought this was a pretty interesting idea so I took a short quote and decided to try and illustrate it. If I really do get around to it, I'll do all twelve ideas and make a poster... but... we'll see! I'm really not good at sticking to things like this!
Going back to the word pictures I saw on Pinterest, the first I pinned myself was the wonderful one below. I spent a good hour or so searching and searching all over the web to try and find out who did this, but I can't find it out! So if anyone knows, please let me know, and I'll add credit! It really made me stop and reassess all those things I'd been moaning about not having the time to do (more drawing) or not having the energy, or money, or blah blah blah. I realised that if I was making excuses for something it might just be because either it wasn't that important to me after all (and therefore I should just stop moaning about it!) or that I needed to make more of an effort and 'find a way' if I really did think it was important. I've been trying to 'find a way' for the more important things a lot more recently, and I've managed to drop a few goals which I never made enough of an effort with, and things seem a lot clearer now.
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