What did I think? That the golden owl from ‘Clash of the Titans’ was going to come to the door with a telegram?
Honestly. Kind of… A little bit, I did…
Daily drawings, week 3.
Uh-oh. Something like ‘cud chewing’ is setting in. Sharing at times feeling like a thing to hold my nose and deal with this week, rather than always feeling like a practice that I am willingly present in.
This week, I have been using the Duolingo (language app) for a few short minutes everyday for a year. A whole YEAR.
Having counted down to the day I hit 365 days for weeks, I was excited about becoming a VIP year-long student (there are only a few hundred million of us): What would the creatives at the language labs reward me with? A personalised glitter bomb? A small man in an owl suit at the door singing ‘YOU are the champions’? A live owl carrying a certificate? Well, the day came… The numbers coquettishly turned and NOTHING.
Not a thing.
Meanwhile, sharing daily drawing: I spy myself squirming out of opportunities to stretch, instead slithering into the long grass of comfortable, repetitive familiarity, keen to split output into shareable and the not-shareable-yet.
In inner conversation around my ‘slitheringness’ I have been thinking about whether loitering in familiarity is any less of a meaningful creative activity than the frontier thwacking of testing out the new and making breakthroughs.
Does recapitulation of the familiar help us to build a pathway to the new?
This week has been a plateauing place for the drawing challenge. A catching of breath after the excitement and growth of big visual breakthroughs previously. I’m also hiding in the grass from the next steps I must take next, the crustacean is in this grass too, muttering about potential failure. ‘La Loba’, the wise old woman in the desert (who I’ve been avoiding for a week) is waiting for me.
Since about day 250, my engagement with the owl centric language app has involved grumpily giving as little of myself as possible each day to keep my streak going, like a broken spirited circus chimp cynically performing lazy claps for a cigarette or a swig of beer. Have I been languishing in the long grass on Duolingo too?
After all of the focus on completing a year (after the anticlimactic squelch of realisation on day 365: Duolingo doesn’t give two hoots about my app streak) a cog clunked into place. Progress is the reward, not glittery owls or digital medals.
The progress we stumble into some days, through regular wholehearted daily engagement: That’s the prize.
It feels kind of unglamorous (and kind of obvious). I see how motivated I am by the thought that I might get a little trinket of congratulation - an external validation chip of some sort and it horrifies me how driven by that I seem to be. I like to think of myself as an entirely independent woman, who doesn’t get distracted by such trivial things. But, I guess I’m in good company (there are a few hundred million of us). I wonder if the other just-turning-365ers had the same weird week.
Now will someone give me a swig of their beer, already? I just hit day 371…
ONWARDS, friends
Of Owls And Trophies