Clearing the mechanism

I’ve been feeling a bit overloaded and distracted lately, with this nagging, but just out of reach feeling that I’m not quite doing what I should be or really want to be doing. Sometimes it’s easy to get completely sidetracked by minutiae that in the scheme of things means (or will mean) absolutely nothing, and just serves to take attention from the real goals.

I received two quilting magazines in Wednesday’s mail, the final 2007 issue of $100,000 Quilting Challenge, and the January issue of American Quilter. As a perfect example of how distracted and distanced from quilting I’ve let myself become, I put those two magazines aside to read “later.” Later could have been next week or next month, which is sad, considering how good most things quilting related are for my mental state.

After a rather bad day Thursday that started with waking up to a huge, borderline migraine headache and a critical, unconstructive, snotty email from someone who has absolutely no right to be so, I decided that what I really needed to do to destress for a bit was quilt. Just quilt, and ignore the rest, because it’ll either go away without intervention and/or thought on my part, or it’ll all still be there when I get back to it.

So I shoved everything else on the back burner and quilted The Misery Quilt for a good chunk of time on Thursday evening. Friday I grabbed those two quilting mags that I’d set aside and flipped through while I ate my lunch, and finally realized that I’ve been spending too much time on stupid things that I shouldn’t even need to care about, and not enough time quilting and working toward my goals: making that prizewinning quilt, growing in my art, and nurturing my creative side. Read the rest of this entry »

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