Going in Circles

and loving it...

Considering how insanely busy things have become (each of those bubbles above could be one of the balls I’m juggling these days), it makes no sense at all that I am somehow squeezing in time to take part in

Wendy MacNaughton

‘s current GUT challenge/community project. GUT, for the uninitiated, is the Grownups’ Table, a place I always longed to sit until I was actually old enough to take my place with the big people. That’s when I realized the kids’ table was a lot of fun and not somewhere I should have been in a hurry to leave.

Each day this week we’ve been drawing grids and circles - ideally during timed bursts of repetitive pattern-making (we’re supposed to set a timer for ten minutes, start drawing either circles or parallel lines, and then stop.) I’ve been doing these (more or less post-it note-sized) squares of circles and lines while on hold with the insurance company, while listening to training videos as I work my way through my Realtor onboarding (hey, there’s science to support the idea that we absorb more when doodling… and these are sort of structured doodles, right?), and while waiting for my husband to emerge from the shower. In other words, sometimes the ten-minute mark wasn’t quite reached or was completely missed.

No matter. These are soothing. Just absorbing enough to hold my attention but completely stress-free. I mean, how can you go wrong with drawing a bunch of little circles and parallel lines?

There are a bunch more which I won’t share here (posting the images feels a bit like trying to share a dream - never quite as compelling as when you are living through that bizarre moment when the cat walks in on his hind legs and you recognize him as your uncle but Uncle J. has a cap-gun in a leather holster and just as he reaches his paw down to draw his weapon you realize you’ve forgotten to unplug the bottle of Tylenol you left sitting in the bathtub which was a terrible idea because your mom (long dead) is coming over and might electrocute herself in the tepid water that keeps bubbling up out of the drain no matter how many old socks you stuff down there to try to keep it plugged).

Sorry. I digress.

Apparently, I am not the only one who is finding this exercise a) worth doing and b) worth sharing. Over on Wendy’s wonderful Chat for subscribers, there are HUNDREDS of these drawings - all unique. The reflections and comments on the process are just as interesting as the pieces themselves. There are line-ophiles and line-ophobes. Those who overlap their circles and those who never let them touch. Lines that never meet and those that criss and cross. We all started with the same simple prompt and yet - the wild diversity of the output is nothing short of astonishing.

Text infiltrates some, lines sneak between circles, circles arrange themselves into grids… Each day brings some new revelation - it gets easier, harder, slower, faster, calmer…

Ok, here’s one more - the last one, I promise.

A couple of quick notes:

What I’m reading:

Searching for Sappho: The Lost Songs and World of the First Woman Poet by Philip Freeman his **

Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality by Max Tegmark **

Both are excellent. Sadly, both are library books so I won’t be able to take them with me on my trip (off to Florida for a week of family fun and real estate investigations).

I suspect I may not have much time to put together newsletters while I’m away, but I am taking my laptop, so you never know :)

**Those are affiliate links. If you happen to click and order, at some point Amazon will send me a few pennies. So… thanks!