choices, choices

I was updating my Studio Year file and I was struck by a couple things.

I keep track (only by keeping old versions of the page, but whatever) of the ideas I've been having. I have the year laid out by month so I can list what my theme was/might be for each month, what I was exploring for the journal page and what I am worried about in the future. My favorite part of the page is the list of potential themes for the future. I am up to 40, maybe a few extra, and the list fills me with conflicting emotions. I love each idea on that list. I read my list, and I can think of 4 easy things, right off the bat for any idea on it. I want to make all of them, plus I keep coming up with new themes to chase. I toy with the idea of taking a theme for each week, instead of a month, so I have a chance to get to all of them, but...

After reading Twyla Tharpe's book on creativity, I am thinking that I need to stick with the month plan.  She describes an exercise she does with rooms full of people, and it is instructive. She calls it 50 things to do with ____ . She picks up an object as she goes to the lecture, then starts a list on the board of all things the audience suggests. She says the first couple are pretty obvious. Using my own terms, the first several are the objects affordances - what it is more or less designed to do - in the instance of a stool, they would be

1. sit on it
2. stand on it
3. use it to reach something

after that it gets labored, with some silly ideas (use it for a hat, use it for a weapon, knock someone over with it), some useless (use it for an anchor), and finally a fit of creativity where some genuinely new and interesting things pop out (upside down, use it for a boat). I have this feeling that if I only do a week on a theme, I'll be stuck at the obvious level, and never get to the really silly, interesting, or genuinely new. It is the thrashing around trying to escape the obvious that produces the most interesting ideas.

I've found something similar over the course of a month. I'll start off simple, get elaborate, and somewhere around the 12th, I'll panic -- OMG more than 2 MORE WEEKS!!! And yet by the time the end of the month arrives, I still have one more postcard than I do days. Even for thirty-one days in March, I had two on the last day - one extra last idea to wedge in!

So I look at my list of ideas and I am simultaneously excited and bummed. Excited to know that these are just the ideas that I have managed to write down, that I won't run out of ideas, that they keep coming... and I am really bummed at the way I can schedule my time for years if I am so inclined, that I might have to leave some of these ideas behind, or something. I'm not so sure about the exact nature of the bummage, but it is there.