Pay it Forward..

Ever since I watched the film Pay it Forward when I was in middle school, I've wanted to initiate a project that could combine people from all over the world and somehow make the world a better (or at least a more interesting) place to live in. In the film, a young boy performs three good deeds and tells each of the people he affected or helped to "pay it forward" and carry out three other good deeds in an attempt to make the world a better place. In the 1000 Journals Project, John Copeland takes this idea about paying something forward with a creative and artistic perspective by spreading 1000 journals across the globe.

I'm really surprised at the fact that I had never even heard of the project! It seems like something that everyone should know and certainly something that I would be very interested in.

In a similar way I had previously attempted to spread dollar bills with doodles on them and kept various journals with my friends which seem very similar to the ones in the 1000 Journal project but rather than circulating the world they only circulated within my group of friends in High School. One day I also found a canvas that only had a few lines drawn in it on the street and immediately thought that it could be a project that involved drawing a line and then leaving the artwork on another random location for the next person to find it. I was terribly excited when I flipped the canvas over and spotted a link to a flikr account. I immediately assumed that one must make something to the drawing, take a picture of it and send it to the flikr account. Unfortunately, my expectations were far too glamorous and the canvas was just some artist's trash. This experience however sparked the need to pay it forward and currently I have been working on ideas for a project that could be what I imagined and then some. Silly me for not knowing that someone else came up with the idea before me and initiated a whole movement with the 1000 Journals Project.

I had also been thinking a lot about the idea that as we get older we must cultivate and nurture our creativity in order for it to develop and grow. If we don't constantly exercise our imagination, it could ver easily get lost. HOW SAD IS THAT?! So I'm glad people like Copeland are taking notice and working hard to promote creative thinking in each and every one of us :)