What are you paying attention to these days?
Gathering your thoughts in the morning.
I like to gather my thoughts in the morning, in a process I now call morning writing.1
It’s not always writing to be honest, there are mind-maps and tables and drawings. And it’s not all long form, some times it’s a scribble and a scrawl across a page. I use a cheap notebook A4 size. I write on the right hand page and leave the left hand page blank.
I often use this blank page for, scratch notes, sketches, and questions to explore in the future. Responses to what I wrote.
It is a process of watching what my mind is paying attention too.
Often attention shifts from one flicker of a thought to another. Following it by writing down what I notice creates a map of the territory. Sometimes I noticed a common thread a distant, laterally related thought.
Like how I noticed today how my biggest influences in art school came from peer to peer learning rather than from what the teachers thought me. Now I did learn from my teachers and those were valuable in a general way.
But the specific things I learned from my peers, hit harder, and impacted me deeper to this day.
In fact, my approach to art really became the sum of those handful of influences.
This is what I learned from my peers in art school…
