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The weather has been absolutely amazing. Yet, I have been working inside almost constantly.

It started to bug me.

In the Netherlands, you need to cherish every bit of sunshine you can get. Before you know, it will be cold and miserable again. And I utterly dislike cold, dark, miserable days. I love sunny, long, warm days.

Everybody I meet seems to be taking full advantage of the warm weather. People have been working on a serious tan without even the need of driving 10 hours to the south. In the meantime, I am still as pale as a white sheet of paper. I wanted to enjoy the weather as well. But I also wanted to finish my countless projects. I couldn’t just betray them for a ray of sunlight.

So I continued on my painting. From the living room table, I would occasionally glance over to the window. Yes, the sun was still shining. Yes, I was still inside. Before I knew it I had welcomed a big old pity party to celebrate with me. It was ugly. And I was the center of it.

Thinking can be tricky. Sometimes you are lazy in your thoughts. Not on purpose necessarily, but you just don’t go that extra mile in your brain patterns. You may see two different options. They don’t go well together. So you choose one. Then you regret not going for the other. But maybe, just maybe, you haven’t considered all your options. Who says that you need to choose? Who decided that work and play don’t go together? How do all these misconceptions get trapped in my brain in the first place?

Hello eureka moment. I grabbed my paint and canvas and moved them outside. It sounds so simple that I almost feel silly portraying the option of painting outside as a revelation. And yet, it was. Somehow I made painting into something that you do inside, while enjoying the weather is something that you do outside. It seemed so logical.

Feeling negative energy or resentment is usually not a good sign. You can ignore it for a while or dwell in it. But you can also examine it and look at your options more closely.

Saying that something is not possible is very easy. Saying that something is possible, well, that can be trickier. Making things possible usually takes some effort from your side. It requires a break in your pattern of thinking. But when you do start to look for solutions outside of what you think is possible, you might be surprised at what you find.

I consider myself a creative and playful person. And yet, it took me a week to even consider the option of painting outside instead of inside.

We all have our creative blind spots. Even the most creative person has things that will block him or her from living creatively and freely sometimes. Creativity isn’t always about finding traces of glue and glitter on your hands. Often it is about the way you approach mundane things. Every tiny situation in your daily life can be an opportunity for you to live creatively. Question your assumptions of what is and isn’t possible. Examine your daily obstacles and use your creative spark to make them go away.

Take a moment to think of the things that you view as obstacles. Is there any other way to approach them?

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