A Data Shard and a return to paint

If you follow me on social media, you’ll have seen there’s been some slow-but-exciting progress on the creative front…

I’ve been working on something called a Data Shard.

I’m still figuring things out, so I don’t want to give too much away and ruin the surprise, but,

because I am a tease,

I’ll tell you this:

It has its own still and moving parts.

(Moving parts. I know. Bet you weren’t expecting that.)

It also has its own specially designed catalogue number…

because apparently inventing one language wasn’t enough.

(I’ve now built a whole second one for Dr Morrow, my archivist, to log these properly).

But alongside all this digital building, coding, naming, cataloguing, I’ve started to notice something else.

A reluctance to paint.

Not a lack of ideas.

Not boredom.

Just a slight resistance that creeps in when I've been living too long in systems, structure, and problem-solving.

It's like my brain knows that the next thing will be messier, quieter, and a lot more vulnerable.

Painting asks for a different kind of attention.

Less thinking.

More listening.

More showing up without knowing exactly where you’ll land.

And if I’m honest, it’s easier to stay where I can work through something logically rather than step back into that open, uncertain space.

So this week is dedicated to painting.

No overthinking.

No perfect plans.

Just brushes, surfaces, and time.

A return to the physical act of making...

before the resistance convinces me it’s something to be avoided rather than something to move through.

Do you know that feeling?

When you feel resistance to doing the very thing you actually want to do.

How do you move through it?