SYTB 23: Did I Make The Right Call?
How to know you are on the right path.
People who have experienced being undermined by others throughout their childhood often have the hardest time with boundaries as an adult. The thing is: deciding your future is like deciding to make a film with no concept for the plot. It all starts with a cannister of blank film and sometimes, not even that.
I recently started painting. It’s rare that I sit down and don’t know what I am going to paint. But even in the cases where I have a clear goal in mind, there are aspects that require creative vision along the way. How should I paint this? What should I put here? How do I represent this feeling or concept in this painting? How do I evoke this emotion? It leaves me scratching my head sometimes. Then when I make a choice, I second guess whether it was the correct one. I find it helps to step away and think before leaping into anything. I often need to contemplate a plan and a vision of how my choices will affect the outcome.
When I was a kid, I loved to draw. I still have a notebook full of half-finished drawings. I was always afraid I would regret the decisions I already made once I finished the drawing and realized things were off. Where I spent so much time and execution on an eye in a portrait knowing when I put the second eye in, it would be painfully obvious the first was in the wrong place. Instead of living with my choices, using them to improve my work next time, I walked away from accomplishments. I left things half-done. I never saw anything through to the finish. It was a guarantee no one could criticize what I had done. Sadly, no one could praise my efforts either. No one could see that I was honing a skill, and no one ever knew I had any talent at all. I was just working in secret and couldn’t even validate my accomplishments to myself. Eventually, my fear of criticism and on top of that, my guilt and shame about not finishing anything lead me away from my first love and skill set as an artist. The worst part is that when I went through hard times during puberty, suffering bullying and ostracism, I felt worthless. I didn’t have anything I put my heart into, no successes or achievements to show for my efforts or to demonstrate my value. When I looked at those drawings that I had spent my youth honing, I saw a quitter and a coward.
The weight of making creative choices can be a heavy one. No one denies that, but I am here to tell you that no choice is heavier than refusing to chose, calling it quits and having nothing to show for a life of hard work. A life that isn’t lived out of passion and creative choices is the hardest work. Perpetuating passionless living just gets harder and harder.
I was looking around at people supporting war recently, a war fraught with political agendas and nuances. People from my country have been learning from the mistakes of past choices of war for over 20 years. We can reflect on the folly of getting into the War on Terror and the devastation it wrought. Despite this glaring error in judgment, most people today are egging on governments around the world to intervene again in foreign affairs of which they know very, very little. This time, they could potentially start WWIII and set off global annihilation. This is in Ukraine, a country that up until last week, most people on earth knew absolutely nothing about. It got me thinking. People like being told what to do and how to think about things. They don’t like living a life of creative choices. In part, it’s because they are afraid that if they make a mistake, like I did with my childhood drawings, they’ll take the weight of that decision wholly upon themselves. Life will become deeply personal. So, rather than make creative choices about their lives, their thoughts and their futures, they let the culture, the society and the media inform their lives. Read that again, the entire shape of their lives is formed around outside, approved perceptions rather than internal integrity or authenticity.
One of my friends, an astute observer of politics and culture has been looking at the issue of people living without regard for intellectual consistency. He says, “people don’t care if they are intellectually consistent anymore.” He’s not wrong. I think the bigger issue is why, and I think I have the answer. First, I don’t think most people feel responsible for intellectual consistency since they aren’t thinking original thoughts. They don’t bear the blame. But the primary reason they don’t think original thoughts and are happy to be ruled or zealously parrot something they either know is invalid or of which they refuse to question the validity of is because they live lives void of meaning. They have been entirely shaped by the outside. They are hollow. It’s far easier to live with someone else’s adopted inconsistency (particularly if everyone else is doing it, too) than to look upon the blank page and assert an original life form.
Many people speak of transhumanism as a future concept, but isn’t artificial life already here? Isn’t it the long running standard? Shouldn’t we be more concerned with creating authentic lives, those how’s and why’s, than how to combat artificial, inconsistent “intelligence?”
It seems focusing on authenticity would remedy a whole array of artifices. But to get past the blank page… This requires a certain amount of practice, follow through and ultimately validation of one’s choices. If you don’t finish, you won’t see what you could do better next time. If you don’t get better, you will be less inclined to practice. If you don’t practice and finish and put your life out into the world, you will never get validation from yourself or others.
The first rule of living an authentic life is that it validates itself. Unlike a painting, your failures and your corrections make your life as a whole, in retrospect even, that much more beautiful and valuable to everyone. Nothing is more beautiful and inspiring to humanity presently than an authentic life. It’s a rare commodity. It requires more courage and confidence than most can relate to. But everyone really wants to relate to it. Your mistakes don’t have to be a warning to others against living authentically but rather a lesson of how to improve in the endeavor more confidently. Your failures and your boldness to share them gives others the courage to try and fail, too. We have to fail to get better. The biggest failure though, one from which you can’t draw improvement is to never try.
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. It’s said to be a metaphor for embracing one’s flaws and imperfections. My oldest and most favorite piece of art is a small jewelry box made by a friend. It was designed from old, torn, wrapping paper overlayed with a mosaic of broken glass and held together with clay pottery. The piece is one of a kind and very exquisite. There are so many ways in which creative thought can remedy and transform mistakes into something far more valuable. But you’ll never know until you start thinking creatively.
Back to boundaries. Living with one’s choice to let someone go or to redirect one’s attention elsewhere, leaving someone once cared for unattended is something with which we all contend. No one is immune to checking the rearview every so often with concern for what might have been. Rearview mirrors can be useful in moderation. They remind us how far we’ve come. They give us a gestalt for our front windshield and the world we are driving in and toward presently. You may be feeling down about where you are or the decisions you are making. You may not see the fruit of creative choices you have implemented in the present. Sometimes, looking at the past helps us to put our advancements in perspective. I can hold up my paintings today as a beginner as compared to my drawings as a child and recognize the advancement and growth I have achieved as an observer of life. My work is in color now! This is something I was never comfortable with, even in high school. Any medium of color once terrified me. Now, I delight in color.
The big message here is that something greater exists that lets you know you are on the right path. You can call that what you will, but it is creative and interactive. It delights in you living authentically with at least as much enthusiasm as I feel working with color. Even as I build this program on boundaries, I have to step away. I have to ask if I am on the right path. I ask myself if this endeavor is worthwhile. I have to consider the next creative decision, the next step forward in helping others formulate their boundaries through saying “yes” to authentic, creative choices.
I took a break yesterday just to enjoy life. I walked over to my mailbox. I felt the sun on my skin and took a deep breath. I was so thankful little indicators of spring were enveloping me. I even threw my hands up as I stepped in the middle of the street as a sign of my exhilaration with the warmth I encountered outside my home. When I opened the mailbox, one of my favorite things was inside. It was the latest issue of Log And Timber Magazine. I carried it back to my house proudly for making the subscription that brings me such joy and inspiration. Then, I set it on the couch and went through the motions of my day: laundry, feeding my kids, keeping an accurate food journal and other formalities. As the magazine sat there, I thought, who is the person that gets to kick back and flip through a magazine? This magazine is just pictures, pretty, pretty pictures. It will occasionally give tips on gardening and building. So much of it is inspiration for me about my future dream home. That dream home feels like something I never finished. With that, I thought of how many of those magazines sit out for weeks until I stack them in a corner never to be flipped through. It’s a potential for joy I have wasted because I am not yet living my ultimate dream.
I opened my magazine late last night. I was not going to let this opportunity go to waste. I started flipping through the pictures. My heart was leaping with each turn of the page. The trusses, the windows, the beams, the craftmanship… The joy of it all filled me. Just as I thought I couldn’t take any more expansion of my heart, the next two pages were white, no giant, glossy photos. They only had a few scribbled illustrations accompanying a two page, small type font article. My eye was creatively drawn entirely to the emboldened title. It was the only thing of distinction on two otherwise sparsely decorated pages of small type font. Want to know what the title was? It was, “Healthy Boundaries.” I don’t know what you make of that, but I call it communion. There is something reaching out from across the universe through space and time, through magazine editors and writers, all using conscious, creative decisions to meet me, the reader in a place entirely unrelated to their intention. It perfectly indicated a very precise, divine orchestrator. I grabbed my phone to document the moment with a photo, and my phone lit up in my hand. The time display showed the numbers 11:11.
If you are living authentically, you may fail here and there, but you are not making a mistake in living an original, creative life. The life that affirms creative choices with joy and inspiration, moreover with love is the only life worth living. It’s the only gift worth giving.
Start to build a life you love living and something in the universe will reach across space and time using the conscious, authentic, creative choices of others to affirm your existence. You owe it to everything alive inside you to try.
What would you love to do? It could be as small as flipping through magazines or visiting a museum or as big as designing and building your own home from the ground up. Write these things down, speak them into existence and start forming a plan, tiny steps to get you where you want to go. Take the action to move closer to your dream. Start being the person who lives the life worth defending by taking one small action step today.
Also, if the universe hollers back, have a journal handy to write it down. Always good to note how things are going, where you are and what is happening in your life when the Almighty decides to grace you with a cosmic DM.