We talking about practice?
My day job is in a preschool where I work in a special education class. When people ask me what I do specifically my response is, “I play with blocks, eat graham crackers, and sing my ABCs.”
Of course, I’m oversimplifying. My job is hard. I have children with behavioral and cognitive issues. I often go home physically and mentally exhausted. So much so that I rarely feel like picking up a camera or a pen at the end of the day. It’s part of the reason why most of what you read on this publication is so short. I’m giving you all I got left.
Having been through several iterations of choosing between passion or paycheck in my life I decided to find a way to do both.
One of the unspoken tasks within a classroom is the process of documenting progress. I have kids who can’t sit still for more than a few seconds at a time. Having them engaged in an activity for a minute or two is a huge win for my students as well as the adults in my classroom. These moments are typically caught on tablets and cellphones. As a photographer there is rarely, if ever, a time you won’t find a camera on me. One day I decided to pull it out and take photos of the children. Nearly five months into the school year and I have created a body of what I believe is my best work to date. The only down side is that I can’t show it for reasons of privacy. Thankfully the staff and the parents appreciate my work has proven to be enough to make it worthwhile.
I even had the opportunity to talk to thirty of the general education students about photography, as well as have them take photos of eachother as part of their own project.
As for my writing, I get a thirty-minute lunch break. For most writers, myself included, thirty minutes might as well be thirty seconds. Either we can’t figure out anything to write or we have everything to write and don’t know where to begin. I have previously written about why I believe haikus should be in every writer’s repetoire. That has been the basis for (re)building my atrophied writing muscles. I have been reacquainting with my voice seventeen syllables at a time. When not scribbling poetry or short journal entry I have been outlining videos for my YouTube channel which has been a whole other thing I have no time for. Outlining (I don’t script my videos because I’m really bad at reading aloud) has been new territory as far as writing goes. I’m still building that muscle.
Through this process I have learned that with some thought and creativity, incorporating our art practices into our everyday lives can be the most substaintial and fulfulling means to better ourselves and our respective crafts—there is also something satisfying in knowing at the end of the day you have fed the captialism monster enough to keep a roof over your head while still satiating your creative self.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to drop a frozen juice box into my glass of tequila and call it a night.
