Today, my girlfriend insisted that I just take the day off, despite my plans to "make up" for lost time yesterday cause I had a bit of a distracted, albeit busy day. I got to spend a lot of time with my family for Lunch on Good Friday. It was a really good day.

At one point, I was hit by a a very real sense of clarity. I'd call it inspiration, as far as creativity is concerned. It was like a switch got flipped inside my head and turned on that part of my brain that makes ideas and believes that they're worth pursuing. It was fleeting.

One of the biggest changes I've noticed in myself over the last 2 years of chasing this dream of mine, to become a full-time artist, is that my own ideas have gotten less and less appealing to me. The predicted payoff vs. the cost of effort it'd take to make them never pans out. Ultimately though, what that boils down to is a whole lot of over-rationalizing which, ironically enough, isn't entirely all that rational.

This led me to realize that I need to practice mindfulness a little better than I have been lately. It's all too easy to fall into the trap of your own mental autopilot and just going along with whatever your fickle brain tells you to do, think, or feel.

Being critical of your own thoughts is important; respond to impulses with questions to help understand yourself. With any luck, you might discover the root causes of those impulses and hopefully mitigate irrational patterns, or try to seek out a solution.