Earlier this year I mentioned that I’d picked up drawing and that I had incidentally drawn an egregious number of Patrick Stars. Today is the day I reveal these Patrick Star drawings.
The other day as I was absentmindedly doodling I realized that I’d drawn Patrick enough times that I’ve now memorized him. So now one of my talents is being able to draw Patrick Star from memory. I draw Patrick Star whenever I want to lift my mood a bit. I draw Patrick when I’m bored or when I’m stressed. I draw Patrick on birthday cards and gift them to friends. I even impressed a girl at the club by drawing a Patrick Star for her.
One of my big themes from this year has been doing things without a pre-established explanation for why I’m doing them. I sort of think of this as “letting the body lead and letting the mind follow afterward.” The mind usually registers this as dangerous: it likes to pretend like it is the one in control. But as you engage this practice more, of letting the body make its move without a monologue from the mind about why that’s the correct move, you eventually realize the mind really was pretending all this time. That is one form of liberation.
One simple practice for doing this is if you’re at the grocery store and want to decide which snack to buy, instead of making a mental calculation like “I haven’t had this flavor of ice cream in a while, let’s do that,” instead just ask your hand “which snack do you want?” and have your hand make the decision for you.
I didn’t set out to make this my year of Patrick Star drawings. It just happened as part of what Henrik Karlssen might call an unfolding process.
what an amazing fun fact this made me so happy
Happy to see you back here. The world of thought certainly needs more Patrick; better to lighten up than be so bleak after all. On another note, I read "The Book of Form and Emptiness" and still thinking about it. Did you notice the rubber duck affair? For me this was one of the highlights of the book plus the Aleph story.