Feel Like You've Been Floating? Get Thee To A Project!

Feel like you've been floating? Get thee to a project!

Put your hands on something solid.
Fix that table leg.
Paint the bathroom.
Sew on a button.
Wash the windows, again.

A project is like a mini-play...

With activities that bind it together, like glue.

One activity joins up with the next one until your project is complete—a beginning, middle and end.

Uta Hagen wrote, “Acting is doing.” Not thinking about doing or wondering about doing or stressing about doing but hands-on-doing.

Her ‘Lost Object Exercise’ is a perfect example. For the exercise you hide your ‘lost’ object… so of course you know where it’s hiding during the exercise. However, if you truly search from point to point you will be grounded in the moment and honestly surprised when you ‘find’ your lost object.

You are doing a series of activities grounding your search—your purpose. There is no “acting” because your anxiety becomes absorbed into the energy of the moment-to-moment search.

Acting becomes forced when it loses its grounded purpose.

Being committed to your purpose and purposefully fulfilling it creates the magnetism of the scene or monologue… drawing the audience in.

Each activity is a mini-play.

You can’t do the whole thing all at once.
But you can do one thing.
The one thing that has a point and a purpose.
You begin at the beginning and take the next itty-bitty step,
Allowing time to complete it, completely…
And that step becomes a building block for the next step.

It’s the way mountaineers get to the summit.
It’s the way ships cross the ocean.
It’s the way your grandmother knit the red sweater.

The magic in the mini-play is the series of activities because they free you into action…

Physicality does that.

Suddenly you’re not trying to act but doing something with purpose and intention and that doing releases emotions that arise organically through you!

In these wild times our focus may change, wane, ebb and flow. Of course it will, it has to.

We may feel the sensation of groundlessness.

We may not see the grand view the way we did before, but we can weed the garden under our feet and make it beautiful.

Just that!

If you clean out the closet or make your bed you experience your bed made or the closet clean and it changes how you feel.

You have affected your environment and that affects your state of mind because suddenly you’re connected to a purpose. And things quickly calm with your focus.

Watch a spider doing what it does… It is getting a project done with a series of activities as it finally drags the deceased insect to the feast.

Activities in acting function exactly as in our daily lives.

Activities connect us to our purpose. Activities ground us in our surroundings. Suddenly, we’re not floating anymore.

We are in the webwork of the play, hooked up, hooked in…

When you beautify your world—sweep your stoop—you attend to the whole world.

Keep nailing down your activities to complete project after project, and you will simultaneously be refining your acting.