Last fall, I was playing around with my welder and created the steel portion of this sculpture. I knew I wanted to put some glass in it but I hadn’t decided exactly what it would look like. So the steel portion sat on my workbench through the winter; periodically I would glance at it, waiting for inspiration to strike. At one point, I created the larger glass circles and put them in a container near the steel. Recently, I started making some frit balls. (Frit is ground up glass in sizes ranging from pebbles down to fine sand and powder. Frit balls are made by heating the small pieces in a kiln until they pull into small, circular shapes.) When I looked at these frit balls, I realized they were the same colors as the larger circles. It wasn’t at all the direction I had intended to go with the glass for this piece; I had been starting to think about replicating that wave pattern with wave shapes in glass. But as I started arranging the small and large circles onto the background glass, the piece started to look kind of fun and unexpected. And I decided to embrace it! In New Jersey we are still “staying inside,” and, like me, you might be struggling a bit with the sameness. If so, maybe today try to do something that feels different than what your routine tells you to do. It might be something silly, it might be changing your perspective, talking in a weird voice, who knows! For me, I’m trying to lean into these moments and allow the unexpected to push me a bit. It’s probably a stretch to call these breaks in the routine “fun” but they are little islands in the sea of sameness that will keep us going.