We have a lot of questions about our lives right now. We know that it’s hard. We are tired, we are stressed, we are frustrated, and we are questioning our choices. Yet, we continue to do the same things in the same ways. We ignore our body’s messages, we continue to focus on our feelings rather than our thoughts, and we continue to act like our lives and choices don’t matter.
We are human, and we choose to do the same things all the time. We try to fix our problems, we try to do something, we think we are being smart or that we are doing good, we try to do a good deed, we try to get better, we try to be better, we try to do something to be proud of, we try to be better, we try to be better.
I don’t know if I’ve said all that. I’ll try. I don’t know what I have to say for myself. I mean, I have a lot to say. I do, because I feel the need to. I feel, like, angry, sad, frustrated, happy, scared, and confused. I feel so many of these things all the time, because I am human.
You may be asking, “What does this have to do with paint?” Well, it’s because you can’t hide those feelings. We can’t, because our feelings are there for all to see. So, while I suppose it’s nice to think of ourselves as “self-aware”, it’s not always so easy to let ourselves feel, to be honest with ourselves.
Feelings. They’re like a really hard brick in our head that keeps us from seeing what we really want to see. Feelings are what keep us on the right path and on the right track. They’re what keep us from falling off the path. As a designer, designer’s job is to help us feel good. The more we feel good, the more energy we have to keep moving forward.
A lot of people seem to think that it’s the mind that’s the culprit. It’s the idea of a positive self-awareness that is the only way to get us there. Even if we haven’t gotten there, we can still feel good through our actions, our thoughts and emotions, all the time. If we feel positive and have the energy to work through our thoughts, we are also able to feel good.
It was recently highlighted that the “more I feel good, the more energy I have to keep working through my thoughts and emotions” has been the source of the most success for so many of our most successful designers. We see the results and are not surprised. It’s because the people who work the hardest are ones that really love what they do. They truly enjoy what they do and their work brings them peace.
This is probably not the most popular of the quotes from Yayoi Kawashima. He basically said, “The more you feel good, the more you can work on your thoughts.” I think it’s safe to say that the more we feel good, the more we can work on our thoughts.
One of the biggest things that we find when thinking about design is that we often have a hard time thinking about our design process. The reason this is so important is that the process of designing is not the same as the process of doing design. This is why we try to take breaks in between all of our design iterations to think about how we are going to move forward with our design. This way we can avoid repeating things that work and the same thing that doesn’t.
