goodbye soul...?

i've been lamenting for some time now the death of my creative soul. i suspected it for some time but now, i confirm it.

i just can't. can't for the life of me pick up a pencil when it used to come so naturally...i ransacked my room last night, in search of proof of a person who used to express herself so liberally on paper with a few strokes of the pencil...i found my sketchbook of seoul...in it were sketches of the wild woods outside of seoul...memories of a days spent enjoying the fresh spice filled air of korea...

the last time i wrote a short except...the last trace that my mind used to flow with colourful images...in February 2006.

that was the year i took off...literally..took off...

i hate what i've become. really i do.

it's not that i'm unhappy, but sometimes i wonder if i've put a part of me to sleep, never to awake. the part of me that lived, that sung, that drew, that gained inspiration from the colours of life...

"Mind Like Water" Simile

I was in the library yesterday checking out books on ASEAN governance. Totally work related, of course, when i stumbled across a book titled 'Getting Things Done- How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity'.

My fragile state of mind yelled desperately to my lethargic physical being telling me to pick it up. The quote from the guardian stated on the cover 'Allen's (the author) ideas are nothin short of life-changing'. As something life-changing was something i desperately needed to help get my life together, i added the book to the heavy pile of books.

I managed to browse through it this morning on the way to work and found this excerpt terribly inspiring.

The "Mind Like Water Simile":

'In karate there is an image that's used to define the position of perfect readiness: "mind like water." Imagine throwing a pebble into a still pond. How does the water respond? The answer is, totally appropriately to the force and mass of the input; then it returns to calm. It doesn't overreach or underreact...

Anything that causes you to overreach or underreach can control you, and often does. Responding appropriately to your email, your staff, your projects, your unread magazines, your thoughts about what you need to do, your children or your boss will lead to less effective reaulsts than you'd like. Most lead to less effective results than you'd like. Most people give either more or less attention to things than they deserve, simply because they don't operate with a "mind like water".'

(Excerpt from Getting Things Done- How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity by David Allen, USA by Viking of the Penguin Grup, 2006)

I'll tell you when i finish reading the book, and maybe you can assess whether i've managed to train my mind to operate with "mind like water". =)