Do you have 5 minutes?

“Oh but I have no time for that . . .”
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I hear this often. In fact I probably say it too. But really it all comes down to your frame of mind.

For around 6 years I was a caregiver for my dad. He had a host of illnesses and dementia made things more complicated. When I look back I was mentally, physically and emotionally exhausted but kept going on by just focusing on the task at hand, living one day at a time. There were so many calls to 911 for an ambulance, emergency rooms, trips to doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, tests. . . We put him in a hospital bed in our family room which was open to the kitchen so he could see us and feel included. I set up the office as my studio which was also on the same floor so I can hear him and easily check on him.

I don’t know if I did this consciously but I started to utilize the little bits of time I had here and there. I did small pastel drawings. So that’s how I got started on Facebook. I started posting one small pastel painting a day. People liked them and came back to see more. They didn’t take too long to do. They were done with snippets of time here and there.

Many people thought I had lots of time to paint. But honestly, it takes your full time and energy to take care of another human being, to keep them comfortable, stable health-wise, and happy. But when I had a little time, I would just go into my office/studio and draw with pastels. I kept them small and loose.

So, what I’m getting at is that you can do this too!

But first you have to claim a space or a spot in your home where you can leave out your art supplies. You don’t want to be spending the time in set-up and clean up all the time. So when you have just 5-10 mins you can go there and put in a few strokes of colour. Not into pastels? You can just sketch with a pencil and paper, draw an eye, a nose.

My daughter wants to learn Japanese. She got an app on her phone and is spending small amounts of time every day. Just yesterday, my mother and I were speaking in Japanese and she could kind of follow along and knew what we were talking about!

Now is the perfect time, while you’re stuck at home, to learn something you’ve always wanted to but thought you didn’t have time for. YouTube is full of free information. You can also learn so much by Googling. (my husband loves to tell our kids, “when we were your age we had to actually go to the library and find books to get information. Now you just have to Google it!”)

So, if you have even 5 minutes, I encourage you to pick up something you’ve been wanting to learn, start knitting, learn a new language, practice a passage on the piano, ok you can also have a nap. Lol

Here's some of the small 5"x7" pastels I did back then.
​You can see more on my Small Daily Paintings page.