When one thing leads to another

Posted on 8 April, 2019

Don’t you love the way one tiny thing can go on to create substantial ripples in the world?

Back in January, a client mentioned she was enrolling in a ‘zentangling’ art class for beginners. As I wrote here, this led to an obsession with art for the next month, which I shared with friends by posting very fledgling drawings on Facebook.

Seeing my early attempts to draw, a few others became inspired to pick up their sketchbooks again for the first time in years. One friend hadn’t touched her pencils since high school, and was reminded of her old visual diary, which she dug out, along with some art supplies.

She’s a member of our young widows group, and she started drawing the faces of our loved ones who have died. When she sent me one of my husband, Jeff, I had a visceral response to it. He is alive in this portrait, so much so that our son can’t even look at it. She’d captured the essence of a person she never met, and it’s an extraordinary talent — which she’d buried for decades out of perfectionism and fear of failure 

Meanwhile, in Western Australia, a mum from my online group had arrived for a residency in a mental health unit for treatment for suicidal ideation and self-harm. She, too, had seen my beginner drawings on Facebook and, with the support of her psych and an art therapist, began the prolific creation of stunning hand-drawn images of insects and jewels and landscapes. She wonders now, if she had remembered her love for this much earlier, how her mental health path might have unfurled differently. The therapy of creating art is having an impact that she hopes will be beneficial for years to come.

Meanwhile, my focus on this other type of creativity, away from writing, led to the resurgence of the ability to read, which I completely lost when Jeff died. I had tried many times to pick up a novel in the last couple of years, but the grief made it too hard to concentrate, so I’d read nothing. In the wake of the art, something shifted in my brain, and now I’m devouring novels as if to make up for lost time, loving them more intensely than ever before.

Hot on the heels of that returned capacity to read, I found myself hopelessly drawn to write a novel about grief. I started a fortnight ago today, and haven’t left it alone since the opening chapter fell onto the page. In two weeks, I’ve written 30,000 words, thousands of them into the early hours, and I only sleep because my arm feels like it’s going to fall off. This is the book I’ve known I wanted to write from the very beginning. I just hadn’t known what form it would take. I hope one day it will raise awareness about what it’s like to survive a loved one’s death, and to rebuild a life from scratch.

It can be so easy to devalue our daily contributions in people’s lives. But we never know where one of our throwaway lines might lead, and the ripples it might create. In this one example, there is vast potential for the unfolding of beautiful new careers, deeper connections, new friends and perspectives and a return of joy.

Perhaps you, too, will become one of the ripples from this story. Maybe you’ll be inspired to give something a go, and that will lead to something else, and cause you to meet people you’d otherwise not have, until one day you’ll be telling the story of how you began, and it will be traced back to this article, and then to our client in the workshop in January and her simple mention of an obscure hobby. What do you think? Shall we see how big this can grow?