Be sure to scroll to the bottom of this post for a PDF version and other notes.
If you’re new to Daily Prompts, you may want to start at the beginning of the series here.
Year______ Month_______Day______Consecutive Practice Days_____Missed Days______
Day 15
Gratitude: (The free PDF below provides lined entries for you!)
In her book on Creative Living Beyond Fear, “Big Magic”, Elizabeth Gilbert describes a phenomenon that I have experienced countless times but had never seen it related or put into such clear language.
As an artist, it is a common experience to have a clear vision of what you want to draw (or write, or sculpt, or compose), but the moment you put pencil to paper, the thing that you create begins to depart slightly from that vision. By the time you finish the art, it might not be anything like what you had intended from the beginning. But that’s not a bad thing.
Elizabeth describes it as your muse speaking through you. She personifies creative inspiration and in doing so, creates the idea of collaboration between you and your creative muse. Your willingness to adapt to the changing vision of the art allows your muse to contribute as you go, and you’re likely to end up with something you’re even more proud of than your original vision.
You don’t have to buy into any woo-woo spirituality to benefit from this concept (Elizabeth is quick to offer this as well.) I’m finding that this might actually be a universally available tool. If we’re able to practice being adaptable and keep refining and discovering new aspects of our Vision for the future, we can stay more creative and find inventive paths to take us where we want to go. Paths that may be illuminated by our openness, but darken when we stubbornly hold onto an attachment for specific outcomes.
When I encourage you to start from scratch each morning and think of a new version of your Vision, I’m not asking for you to agonize or take too long in coming up with all new future desires. I’m hoping you’ll simply allow yourself to riff on what you currently desire for your future and not get too hung up on building a consistent Vision. The consistent patterns will emerge on their own as you’ll begin to notice recurring themes in your daily practice.
It’s those consistent desires that we’ll move toward as we integrate The Lyceum Method.
Vision: (The free PDF below provides lined entries for you!)
Daily: (The pdf version below contains three lined pages for your daily journal)
NOTE:
The above is an excerpt from the upcoming The Lyceum Course Journal. We will be releasing it here for free as a Daily Prompt blog post. If you would like a physical copy, we will link to it here once it is released.
Suggested Use:
I realize a daily journal prompt on a blog is a little weird. This is how I would suggest using it: Open your favorite note-taking software such as Evernote, copy and paste this post into it, and write your daily entries there.
OR
Download a PDF version of this post here. Feel free to print it out, or access it through a PDF editor where you can type in your daily entry.
Collaborate With Me!
This post series is a first draft of the future book. If you have suggestions, comments, or see errors, please reach out so that I can make the final product more valuable for you and the rest of the community. Your feedback is greatly appreciated!
