Driving force.

What motivates, drives and rules me is my passion.

Finally in my oder age I have learned how to maintain a healthy balance while allowing my passions to be my central focus.

How I maintain my personal harmony is to be very careful to set a few guidelines ( rules ) in order to insure my passions do not over take everything and thus turn into living an unhealthy and unbalanced life.

Here are the 3 simple rules I live by -

1-The passion has to bring me joy in the moment AND create GOOD memories. That rules out a lot of poor impulsive choice making .

2 - Do FIRST THINGS FIRST - Most of my "first" are doing the basics of what a person needs to do in order to live a healthy life such as earning a living, paying bills, keeping things clean, eating well, and exercising etc...

I keep a " to do list" and work at checking things off each morning. I try very hard to not procrastinate as I hate things hanging over my head. Once the basic living stuff is done for the day I have the rest of the day free to pursue my passions ,which is mainly creating .... YIPPEE

Several years back I did a major simplifying of my life. This involved eliminating physical clutter (purging 90 % of all I owned ) and eliminating relationship clutter. Gone are most all who cluttered my brain with pain . This included many family members.

One does not have to have "pain in the butt people" in ones life just because they are family.

These where simple concepts, but boy they where NOT EASY to implement . However the rewards of pursing a simpler life have been profound. I spend less time obsessing about bad relationships, and less time on my basic "to dos" as I have less things to manage and this has given me more time for my passions. The end result has been a joyful life .

Does this sound selfish? Well then on to number three ....

3 - Be a good member of society by giving back and try ones best to live by the Golden Rule . Easier to do when life is filled with more joy.

So the past few days my passion lead me down this creative path ....

I created an end cap Shrinkets shrink plastic template for this piece. I hope to do a lot more exploring with uses for these end caps. I also love movement so the rings on the end caps jingle around.

Making the polkadot twisted dagger beads was fun .I had thought I would add polkadot beads to the piece to tie it all in but ended up passing on the idea in the the final design edit.