Happily…….
Salutations, happy people! Or perhaps you’re not so happy, thats’ okay too. I wanted to write a post to introduce you briefly to Happily Ever Drawn and explain more about what it all means.
Happily Ever Drawn. What do those three little words mean, and what do they mean here? Happy sometimes gets a bad rep… Thinkers discuss its meaning in relation to joy or contentment… discuss how we can’t hold onto it, how to be zen about holding onto happiness… Plus for some it might feel like too much pressure to aim for happy when just existing is hard enough. (Wow, this got deep very fast!) To others, disillusioned with fairytales, the word might even feel childish or glib. Yet we know it’s what we all want- it’s literally what many people would ultimately say they’re striving for.
The Happily describes the beautiful, free feeling of happiness that comes from the deep, be it the deep well of Flow, the deep well of Knowing or the deep well of Contentment. It might be a temporary word but there are ways of bringing more of it to ourselves. How do we hold on to happiness in a world that makes it hard for positivity to stick? As creative people, we are lucky, we’ve identified a Thing that makes us happy when we do it- but how do we keep that feeling and not let it get suffocated by the pressures of trying to turn it into a career, or losing the moments of happy creation amidst the chaos of not feeling good enough, not skilled enough, to cross past The Gap? I personally find the concept of The Gap so interesting, it deserves a separate blog post, and it shall have one. Keep posted.
In a nutshell, how do we keep the creative flow a happy state? Because it isn’t a given.
As creators, we need a unified approach to mental and physical health to keep us going on our creative path. I’m not saying we need to always be happy or ignore our feelings that aren’t happy- of course not. And sometimes our best work comes from pain, let’s face it. But we still need that balance, to be able to create from a place of peace, live holistically, and all that jazz. We deserve it, we do. Yes, you too.
I believe there are answers.
At Happily Ever Drawn, especially following along with the School of Art, we’ll be confronting happiness and investigating it, harnessing it in our sails to keep us going, even on days when let’s face it, we don’t want to get out of bed except to eat chips on the sofa.
One thing that makes me a happy creative is the physical act of drawing. Turning an idea into a fleshed out little person, colouring it in- usually on procreate or occasionally with gouache and pencil. But I’ve had to learn how to breathe through disappointment too, as sometimes it just isn’t happening. My most mindful happy place creatively is at the potter’s wheel, probably because I’m making my intangible dreams a reality but it’s completely separate from anything else- it’s pure expression. And it’s fun even when I mess it up completely and have to start again. What do you think? What’s your pure expression? Where’s your happy place? Let us know in the comments below.
More on this very soon.