Living In The Moment, or Reclaiming Phrases

Why do we feel the need to live in anything other than the here and now? Perhaps it has something to do with a sense of not having what we want in our lives at the moment: a boy, a girl, a job, a friend, a possession, that makes us think about things that are different than what we have at the moment. When you really stop to look at the world around you, right at this very moment, it beautiful. Just looking at the way the sky looks through the leaves of a tree at sunrise, how the song that you have on collides with that image and perfects the moment, echoing the beauty and adding to it. Or perhaps its the way the trees look at night (I'm a tree person), seemingly black silhouettes against the inky blue of the sky at the period of time between dusk and night. Just stopping to look, truly look at these little things will give you the most amazing feeling in the world, if you can put everything else away for just a few moments. I find it very difficult to do this, to stop thinking about what happened at work, or might happen tomorrow, next week, next year. Especially since I spend the majority of my time creating or living in imaginary worlds, it is difficult to be completely and wholly in this one. Being in that moment is truly magical. And being present in the here and now is the ultimate achievement for an actor. As an actor I have heard the phrase "In the moment" so often, and often so ridiculously said, which an over exaggeration of all the vowels in the word moment, that I hate the phrase and often find myself awarding less credibility to persons I hear saying it often. But putting aside all past experiences with this phrase to be truly in the moment is an amazing feeling, both onstage, and off. Being truly in the moment in real life is perhaps even more important than when you achieve it and you are not in real life. (I include everyone, not just actors in this idea). Obviously we can't all just sit around and revel in every momentary atmospheric condition, no matter how fun it is, all the time. Whenever we get the chance, however, we should try it. It can be quite a strange feeling, truthfully, realizing how fleeting time is, how every second that happens is different than the one before, and the fact that we can never truly recreate that instant, but with the risk of feeling a bit strange, you take a soaring leap into the arms of the present, and gain better knowledge and appreciation of the world around you.

A Mannequin Would Be Useful...

...but then that would take all the fun out of playing dress up with long pieces of flowy material! So in addition to working as the costume designer for Looking North, an indie tv show I'm currently working on, I've recently agreed to assist with a new line of clothes a friend of mine is adding to his current jewelry business. When I was little one of my favorite things about bathtime was seeing how many "dresses" I could create by wrapping myself in bathsheets in creative fashions. Luckily, my mother thought I was cute, and didn't fuss over the amount of towels I tended to use on my fashion sprees. Last night, while practicing my veil routine for an upcoming performance, my new kitty, Persia wrapped herself around my legs while I was spinning causing my veil to become tangled, so I stopped to untangle it. In the process I noticed the veil was quite interestingly wrapped, so I went to have a look at it. Upon seeing it in the mirror, I suddenly had the most wonderful idea for a dress that would incorporate almost every aspect of the dresses that my friend and I had been discussing. I then spent the next hour with two other veils wrapping them in the perfect manner so as to see how the dress would look. I then took a couple of snaphots, so I can start drawing the dress. So basically, under the guise of "working" I spent an hour playing dressup! And I must say, I think this dress is going to be a winner. ;) So, even though a mannequin would be quite convenient, and I could stick pins in it to hold the fabric in place, and I wouldn't have to continually be running back and forth to the mirror to see if everything was in place, I just don't think it would be quite as fun as getting to play dressup is. More details will follow soon on our new endeavor.

But for now, if you would like to get involved with something that I'm working on, then you should follow the below link (to a kind of awesome blog anyway, and the above mentioned friend of mine!) and help out Looking North with its first ever fundraiser!!

http://www.collinmizell.com/2010/06/looking-north-could-use-your-help-to.html