Today, I woke up as a dancer. Maybe I should elaborate?  One of the exercises in week 2 of the Artist’s Way involves choosing five imaginary professions for yourself, and then incorporating aspects of each profession into your life. I chose dancer as one of my five.

Earlier this year I read Twyla Tharp’s book “The Creative Habit.” From the perspective of a professional dancer turned choreographer, Twyla provides advice and information on making a habit out of creativity. One of her tips is on creating a morning routine that gets you prepared to work. She says that in order to create this routine, you just need to commit to doing the preliminary motions. For example: Twyla’s routine consists of getting up in the morning at something crazy like 5am to go to the gym. In order to uphold this routine, she commits only to the next step. Her alarm goes off, and she commits to getting out of bed and calling a taxi to pick her up in 15 minutes. Now she’s locked in, so the next step is to get into her running gear, and getting herself down to the sidewalk. She doesn’t need to commit to exercising every morning; she just needs to commit to calling a cab. This is really a great way to think about doing things that you find difficult to start/accomplish. Just take it one step at a time. Or commit to things that will better help you to accomplish your goals (trick yourself in a way). Instead of committing to sitting down at your computer and writing a 900 word article for a column (something I got a chance to do recently), commit to turning off your internet connection for an hour and a half. Does this make sense? You don’t necessarily need to commit to completing the task itself, you just need to commit to the motion that will provide you with the momentum needed to check the real task off your to-do list.

Anyway, thinking about what Twyla Tharp said, I decided to wake up this morning as a committed dancer. My alarm went off, and I jumped out of bed at 5:45am. I got myself ready for the day, picked up my yoga mat, and did some sun salutations and long luxurious stretches and balance poses before sitting down with my rice cake and peanut butter to write my morning pages. As I walked to work, I pretended like I was on my way to my studio to rehearse and play. It was such an interesting feeling, and I really had myself convinced that what was happening was true.

Try this yourself. If you could live five different lives, what would they be?

I’m going to leave you with this quote from the “The Artist’s Way”:

“I like to think of the mind as a room. In that room, we keep all of our usual ideas about life, God, what’s possible and what’s not. The room has a door. That door is ever so slightly ajar, and outside we can see a great deal of dazzling light. Out there in the dazzling light are a lot of new ideas that we consider too far-out for us, and so we keep them out there. The ideas we are comfortable with are in the room with us. The other ideas are out, and we keep them out.” (Julia Cameron)

Challenge yourself to explore what’s behind that door. Play a little make-believe, and have fun with this exercise. If there’s one thing that I’m learning, it’s that life isn’t meant to be taken too seriously. We were put on this earth to play.