Stick-to-itiveness

Intro to a week of articles.

OM.2024.114 - Zach Touchon - USA - ‘PAL’ - collage on panel - 8 x 8 inches - Visual Poetry and Color Exhibition

Stick-to-itiveness

This morning, I woke up laughing from some funny thing going on in my dreams that I thought was amusing. But I rapidly forget all the details of my dream world. I will often, when I first wake up, just sit for a few minutes on the edge of my bed and survey my inner landscape and listen to whatever thoughts or images are floating around.

Then I was thinking to myself that I need to write a ‘creative lifestyle’ article today about something and I started wondering what that might be. The first thing I usually try to think up is a title for an article, a motif to contemplate. What came to mind was sticktoitiveness.

I have not thought of that word for a very long time but it popped out. I wondered if I was making that up or if it was an actual word so I decided to look it up and sure enough, it is a word! But it has a couple of hyphens in it: Stick-to-itiveness. First known origin: 1859 in the Detroit Free Press. Synonyms: persistence, tenacity, purposefulness, determination. Ok, so there you go. That is the motif for today that I will explore.

But another thing I was thinking about, which is related, is how busy we all are, how we flit around from one thing to the next and it seems like we often loose our way or feel like we are. All of the messing around we all have to do on a daily basis, taking care of this or that thing gets us off our game and away from our deeper purposes like, for instance, pursuing our creative work.

How do we stick with it or keep coming back to it in the midst of everything else life demands of us?

Then the other thing is, the stuff we really need to remember and focus on gets lost in the piles of detail and information like an important note-to-self in a stack of papers, bills, junk mail, etc. but that note-to-self, which might just be a one liner of profound wisdom that you want to remember and incorporate into your way of living, is buried in the pile and forgotten until who knows when. That was a long sentence. The point is, while we are skipping around on the surface, we are not penetrating to the depth. So I want to talk about that problem too.

Then, there is the problem of patience. By the time you have gotten this far in what I am saying, while sitting at your computer or reading on your phone, you are wondering ‘So are you going to get to the point or what? I have shit to do!’

Now I am nervous because I have only laid out what I am thinking about talking about. But the good part for me is, I have nearly reached my 500 word daily goal for my journal. So, at least for myself, I have hit the mark and achieved, for the day, my own stick-to-itiveness.

So let’s call this an introduction to my themes for the last week of August which starts tomorrow or is Sunday the first day of the week? I am always confused about that. All days are the same day to me.

Anyway, I hope you have a great Sunday today, more on Stick-to-itiveness tomorrow. (563 words)