Retirement eCard…media consumption takes many forms.

From my book/eCard collection, Incomplete Book of Retirement Wisdom, which also doubles as a collection of eCards.

Save/download the image above and send it to a retired/soon-to-retire friend or family member.
Better yet…

• call it up in an image editing program [even a presentation program like PowerPoint will work]
• slap an even better caption on top of mine or add a personal comment
• export it as a JPG or PNG, and email/text message it to that person.

Video: One way to make a blackout poem…

I’ve shared two blackout products over the last couple of days

Here is how I create them.

More ‘advice from beyond’ for creators…

Credit to Austin Kleon for the nudge to use the ‘blackout’ strategy for an added form of communication…

**Original astrological content from https://www.jacquelinebigar.com/

Advice ‘from the stars’ for creators…

Credit to Austin Kleon for the nudge to use the ‘blackout’ strategy for an added form of communication…

[Note: I’d like to think you don’t have to be a Scorpio to heed the advice.]

State of the Union

Lesson learned. Produce first, then…

…deal with the annoying stuff.

It’s not easy to crank up the momentum and confidence needed to fill your pages.
After breakfast, I launched into decluttering…even before shaving and cleaning up. Not only did I feel grungy [counterproductive in its own right]

• A. I wasn’t writing.
• B. I was wasting that precious morning buzz [i.e. creative energy] on sifting through and boxing ‘stuff’.
• C. I didn’t crank out that initial ‘first 100 words’ on paper, a practice I started when I homed in on mindfully ‘showing up’ to my creative projects.
• D. I was getting annoyed by A. and B and C.

Luckily, choosing to reconnect with a former student and a former teaching colleague, I did get my keyboarding fingers moving and real words [with value, even!] danced across the screen. AND I’ve even resisted the urge to turn on the AFC Championship game.

So, I guess the lesson for today is: Don’t give up hope. You can rise above all kinds of obstacles, even the self-imposed ones, and move forward with your projects.

NOTE: If your word processor offers the ‘Focus’ feature that displays just your text–no distracting menus, programs running in the background–give it a try.

Reinvention Writing Prompt of the Day–What about ‘giving back’?

Revisiting spontaneous creativity…

Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

Fellow reinventors, a long while back I wrote about baking as a form of spontaneous creativity.

Well, sweet Georgia Brown if I didn’t find more justification for the art of mixing flour, sugar, eggs, [yeast, if you’re leaning toward bread], and heat.

The Rise of Anxiety Baking

Thank you, The Atlantic and writer Amanda Mull.

A few favorite quotes:

• “It’s nice to be able to bake and know that I’m creating something that has a beginning and an end and people can enjoy it,” she [Folu Akinkuotu] says. “A lot of people have jobs that traffic in ideas or theoretical things, so it’s nice to make physical things.”
• “…baking does indeed force you to put down your phone, get your hands dirty, and pay close attention to what you’re doing.”
• “Most baked goods still taste good even if they’re not perfectly executed…”

Need a little nudge into the kitchen and engage in a little culinary reinvention?

Easy cookie recipes from Bon Appetit

MarthaStewart.com’s Easiest Cookie Recipes

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Here is the repeat of my post entitled, Celebrate spontaneous creativity.

Those can be magical moments.

For me, it happens most often in the kitchen.

Why? Consider all the available tools and ingredients.

And then there’s the love of food.

And spontaneity can also be fed by the time of day or the day of the week.

Sunday afternoons are a time for baking. Sure it’s fun to thumb through a cookbook or launch a Google search for quick and easy coffee cake [a more-than-occasional venture at our house], but it’s just as fun to use the recipe as a foundation for experimentation.

Case in point: Last Saturday morning.

I was all set for our traditional jaunt to the local farmer’s market. But I didn’t feel like waiting for breakfast.

Someone once proposed that hunger was the mother of invention. I think it was me.

The next thing I knew, amidst a cloud of two kinds of flour, a little corn meal mush, separated eggs, and the other expected ingredients, I had set up a waffle station. Soon after came the colby cheese for one batch, the almonds and dried cranberries for another. [The true miracle, however, was forgetting to add chocolate chips for ‘she who must have chocolate’.]

Soapbox time: We retirees should revel in times like this. Remember…’try new’.

I looked up ‘spontaneous creativity’ and there is a book with that title, but I was drawn instead to this 2013 post from Scott Myers:

That is where relying on our creativity is most important. This implies a kind of trust in our creative instincts and that implies having worked with our creativity enough to learn to trust it.

But in truth if we trust in our creativity, we can surprise ourselves with moments of deep insight to help us perform to our best ability.

Okay, waffles aren’t exactly a deep insight, nor was my dinner tonight, which was supposed to be bangers and mash, but ended up as mustard greens/caramelized onion/sausage/sun dried tomatoes swimming in a chicken broth base, topped with a splash of balsamic vinegar, served over a bed of cavatelli.

But while not profound or life-changing, the spontaneous creativity can’t be denied.

Reinvention Pondering Point: Living on purpose

Greater Good Magazine offers up other helpful suggestions in this piece, but as a fellow ‘reinventor’, I will point you to number 6 in the list, Tell Your Story. It touts the power of reflection and realizing our value to others.

Reinvention Writing Prompt of the Day–Define ‘honeymoon’.

I like this quote from Mark Patterson’s post on gotoretirement.com.

“Waiting for something different to happen after you retire is not a plan and may lead to discontent.”

You can also find some good ideas for a proactive retirement in this aboutboomers.net post.