I am still quite new to all this blogging stuff. As I began this blog, I noticed in the column at the left the word “Comments” follow by the number 19 in a red circle. I looked it up and it turns out that the first blog I ever posted, dated June 20, 2016 and entitled Writing & Music: A Tug of War has 19 comments. What I don’t understand is why none of the 14 posts that follow it have any comments at all. I wonder if perhaps I must “enable” comments on each individual blog. Perhaps someone was helping with that first blog but were never around after that to help me. One day soon I will look into the “comment” dilemma.
Today has been a tough day for me in that I realized I was in and even more complex Tug of War than noted in my first blog. As my most recent two blogs will demonstrate, “art” has been added to writing and music, so it is now a three-way tug of war. I wonder how that would work in reality; three ropes tied together at one point and creating three equal angles with three persons or groups pulling in their own direction. Sounds interesting.
And I was considering the fascinating, though now seriously challenging, idea of the 10,000-hours of “deliberate practice” suggestion proposed by Malcolm Gladwell; that that many hours was needed to be invested in order to become exceptionally proficient at anything worthwhile. If I divide my time equally, for example, between writing, music, and art, will I end up being a jack of all trades (and master of none)? If I were to give one or (heaven forbid) two, which would I give up? Should it be the latest one added–art–the one with the least time investment thus far? Isn’t it interesting that art, the one most recently added for development, is the one I have added to the previous two posts in the form visual media?
I took care of that, didn’t I? I also like to cook. My favorite things to invent and cook are desserts and soups. I am seriously considering taking time off from everything artsy and putting together a cookbook. Yum!
I stopped what I was doing a week ago last Wednesday, whipped up these brownies, took the picture, set up a mock-page with ingredients and steps to prepare, and two days later met with a book printer to see about the cost of printing a nice 120-page cookbook. Actually, the cost per book for a run of 100 books was pretty much in line with what such a book would sell for at a book store. As fun as it sounds, it is in reality just one more thing pulling me away from the other two, in this case art and music.
About 35 years ago, at a time in my life that I found quite confusing, I went in search of a therapist in hopes of coming to a greater understand of the origins of my many struggles. She had met with other members of my family, so she understood the dynamics of my family. She was the first to point out to me that I had some of each of the talents exhibited by other members of my family. It was an intriguing idea at the time, but today with the three-way tog of war thought in my mind, I am wondering if that situation could best be described as a mixed blessing. Where do I go from here? My art teacher and my fellow students think I should keep going in art, despite many of them having read my books and loving them.