One of my favorite Illustrators is Lisa Congdon. Have you heard of her? Google her. She also wrote a book called A Glorious Freedom, Older Women Leading Extraordinary Lives which I discovered after I started thinking about my book idea. More on that in a future post. She wrote beautiful stories of women doing amazing things and they are all over the age of 40. Very inspiring! Lisa didn’t really get into her artistic career until she was 40. My hero! She’s pretty rad. She did an art piece of a pair of scissors with the phrase, consider everything an experiment. It stuck with me ever since I saw it. When I get overwhelmed with a project or goal or don’t want to expand beyond my comfort zone, this is the phrase I use to reframe. I just tweaked it to: Consider life an experiment.

One area where I took this idea to heart this year was with my artwork. I set a goal to have my art work up for at least 6 months out of the year. I thought, how can I make that happen? I don’t know where exactly to start. What do I want this to look like? Will anyone come to my shows? Let me experiment! I reached out to different venues – coffee shops, looked online for pop up venues, put the word out to friends. Guess what? I managed to make it happen this year. What helped was reminding myself that life is an experiment. When I stopped stressing, things happened. Most importantly I enjoyed myself and had fun in the process.

Is there anything you’ve been stressing about? Something which makes you nervous because you’re going to have to do something you’ve never done before? If so, consider life an experiment. Just try it on and see what happens!