Class 3 ~ What if human qualities were people we could meet?

In my journey to use art as a tool for self-discovery, I’ve sometimes found it useful to step away from some aspect of myself or my situation, and view things as if the experience involved unique individuals instead. This habit came to me after reading The Book of Qualities by J. Ruth Gendler, which I stumbled on it shortly after it’s 1984 publication.
In her book, Ruth Gendler explores more than 70 human qualities in short, poetic paragraphs, giving them histories, habits and attributes. From where they live to what they eat, from what they wear to what their friends say about them, she describes the qualities as if they were the people next door. As well as being poetic, the descriptions are insightful and sympathetic. I can easily imagine these sensitive, flawed, hopeful people populating the world I live in ~ interacting with them, having things in common with them.
I think we tend to be more compassionate and understanding of other people than we are of ourselves, so by externalizing our feelings, I think it’s possible for us to be more compassionate and understanding of our feelings and the situations that lead to them.  Essentially, it lets us detach from the feeling long enough to perceive how we would relate to someone else feeling that way, and maybe see our feelings, and our situation, more clearly.

In your handout below I've summarized some Qualities she explores, and left room for you to add more:

I highly encourage you to search out more of from her book. As you can see I've included Contentment on the first page to get you started. You can find more of her beautiful poetic writings about the Qualities as people by looking inside the book description at Amazon. 

Here are my journal pages, so you can see how I worked with the handouts: