Hi there.

Thanks for popping in.

Every morning, without fail, Dave reads a page from his little book of Tao Daily Reflections. It’s become part of our routine. Tea, toast, the cats wandering about looking hopeful, and then a quiet thought to start the day.

This morning one sentence leapt off the page.

“The irony of life is that it’s a one-way journey.”

I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

It really is, isn’t it? There are no U-turns. No rewind button. Yesterday has gone forever and tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. All we really have is today, and what we choose to do with it.

The older I get, the more I realise that life isn’t usually changed by one enormous decision. Of course, there are the big milestones – getting married, changing jobs, moving house or starting a business. But I honestly believe our lives are shaped far more by the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tiny decisions we make every single day.

It’s rather like driving. If you turn the steering wheel just a fraction today, you won’t notice much difference by teatime. By next week, you’ll be travelling along a slightly different road. A year later, you’ll have arrived somewhere completely different.

Our lives work exactly the same way.

Yesterday reminded me of that more than ever.

I spent the whole day yesterday above the garage in my art room, preparing and recording the mini projects for our August Creative Affirmation Card Challenge. Thirty-one little projects, one for every day of August.

The whole idea behind the challenge is wonderfully simple. Set aside a little time each day to make something. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. It doesn’t even have to be finished. The important thing is simply to make art every day, or at least to make creativity part of your daily routine. Half an hour if you can spare it. Twenty minutes if that’s all you’ve got. Just enough time to feed that creative part of yourself that so often gets pushed to the bottom of the list.

By the time I switched the camera off yesterday evening, I sat back feeling ridiculously pleased with myself. I’d set myself a personal challenge to have all thirty-one demonstrations designed, made and recorded by Monday morning and, much to my delight, I’d actually done it.

I was so chuffed.

Not because every project was perfect – they never are – but because I’d made a promise to myself, and I’d kept it.

As I sat there looking at the pile of finished projects, another thought occurred to me. When people watch those little demonstrations throughout August, they’ll probably see thirty-one creative projects.What they won’t see are the thirty-five years that made those projects possible.

The truth is, those projects took thirty-five years.

Not thirty-five years to make, of course. They took one Saturday to design and record. But behind every little demonstration sits another day, and another day, and another day of drawing, painting, stamping, teaching, making mistakes, starting again, experimenting, practising and learning. Thousands of perfectly ordinary days, each one adding another tiny layer of experience.

Nobody sees those days. They only ever see the finished result.

It’s rather like learning to play the piano. Twenty minutes’ practice this afternoon won’t make much difference by bedtime. Practise every day for five years and you’ll be playing pieces that once seemed impossible. I often look longingly at our old piano in the corner of the dining room and feel a slight twinge of regret. If only I’d pursued that twenty-minutes-a-day habit thirty years ago, when I bought the thing… who knows? I might have become quite a decent pianist by now.

Then again, perhaps that’s the wrong way of looking at it. Perhaps the real lesson isn’t to regret the habits we never started. Perhaps it’s to start the ones we still can.

That’s the wonderful thing about life. Although we can’t turn the clock back, we can still choose what we do with today. We can’t change the decisions we made twenty or thirty years ago, but we can decide what we’re going to do this afternoon. We can put the kettle on and spend half an hour drawing. We can make a card. We can get the paints out. We can take a walk. We can ring an old friend. We can be a little kinder, a little more patient and a little more creative.

Heck… I could even dust off How to Play the Piano for Beginners and finally give it a go!

Every one of those decisions is only the tiniest turn of the steering wheel. Hardly noticeable today. But given enough time, those tiny turns determine where the bus eventually arrives.

So this Sunday, I’m feeling rather grateful. Grateful for yesterday’s little victory. Grateful that, thirty-five years ago, I quietly nudged the steering wheel in the direction of creativity, without having the faintest idea where that road would eventually lead. And grateful that tomorrow morning, when the bus sets off once again, I’ll have another opportunity to make another tiny decision that might, one day, make all the difference.

After all, life really is a one-way journey. We can’t change where we’ve been, but every single choice we make today has the power to change where we’re going.

If you’re joining us for the August Creative Affirmation Card Challenge, perhaps that’s all the encouragement you need. Don’t worry about creating a masterpiece. Just make something. Tomorrow, make something else. Then repeat.

You never know where those tiny daily habits might take you.

Love always,

Barb x