Life at one remove

This evening we went to see “Julie & Julia” Meryl Streep’s latest tour de force, a charming film about a cook, two couples and a blogger.  Julia Child’s was the lady who introduced Americans to French cooking.  Julie was someone who decided to write a blog about her exploration of the Child’s cook book “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”, and cook all 524 recipes in 365 days.  The film is a lovely exploration of how one set of lives can influence, change and inform another set.

I couldn’t resist the idea of being a Cooke blogging about a blogger blogging about a cook. 

The thing is that when we place a distance between us and an idea it helps us see things differently. This approach is used in NLP to help people deal with traumas, but it can also be helpful to examine ideas which challenge us.  We can see others wrestling with our dilemmas, going places we might prefer to avoid, and somehow it loosens things for us. 

So if you find yourself struggling with an issue that is too big and scary to confront head-on, explore it at one remove.  Ask yourself how would ‘X’ handle might this (where X= whoever you wish); run a movie with someone else starring in your role; watch a cartoon version of it; play with all the different ways it could unfold.  This allows your creativity to make its maximum contribution and helps lower the threat levels.

Give it a try and let me know how it works for you…

“Hunger is not only the best cook, but also the best physician.”

“Non-cooks think it’s silly to invest two hours’ work in two minutes’ enjoyment; but if cooking is evanescent, so is the ballet.”  Julia Child

Tags: creativity, julie & julia, life at one remove

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 20:47 and is filed under Blogging, Hints, Tips & Techniques, Personal Change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.