Accepting Life as It Is
Journal Entry: Friday, August 26, 2022
Accepting Life as It Is
“Accept everything just the way it is.” Miyamoto Musashi (Japanese Samurai swordsman)
“You have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give.” – Eleanor Roosevelt (first lady)
“Accept the things to which fate binds you and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.” – Marcus Aurelius (roman emperor who kept a stoic journal)
“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” ― Lao Tzu (founder of Taoism)
“For after all, the best thing one can do when it is raining is let it rain.” ― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (writer)
“Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, So what? That's one of my favorite things to say. So what?” ― Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
Let’s say it is going to take you a few years to go through the research and development phase of your style, find your voice, master your techniques, achieve a satisfactory degree of self-discipline and slowly fashion a lifestyle that suits your personality, you are well on your way. By keeping your footprint small and your costs low you can grow into the creative lifestyle you are looking for.
Maybe you have to work at jobs you are not that thrilled about, maybe you have a family to take care of, maybe there are other obstacles to overcome or deal with. That’s perfectly normal, everyone has those issues. If you have potential drug or alcohol problems developing, nip that in the bud. Life is hard enough sober.
At a certain point you might realize that you are living the kind of life you want. You are spending as much time as you need on your inner creative life, you have adjusted it to be sustainable for you without being absent from the rest of your life like your job or your family. Your mind is calm, your heart is clear, your intuitive knowing is functioning. If this is the case then maybe you’re there, you have attained the basic goal. Then you just keep deepening yourself in your process.
Lifestyle is about one’s day to day life. While there may be an over-arching goal you are working toward, life is about the journey and the experience of living from one moment to the next.
Most of the suffering an artist does (at least in my case) is related to resisting the unavoidable, avoiding the inevitable, and longing for the unattainable (at least in the short run).
Resisting the unavoidable are those things which you, like everyone else, must do such as support yourself, pay your bills, go to work, take care of your car, feed yourself and your family, change diapers, helping the kids do their homework, etc. and so on.
Avoiding the inevitable like keeping your life in order, planning out what needs to happen in the near future, and endless other things.
Longing for the unattainable or, in short, for a future happiness that has not arrived: ‘What if I had an extra million dollars?’, ‘What if I was famous?’, ‘When am I going to feel successful?’, ‘When am I not going to have to worry about the bills every month?’ Etc.
‘I don’t want my life like this.’, ‘Why is the happening to me?’ Etc.
Living an artistic or creative lifestyle is not something that will magically happen at some point in the future. It is something you start building in the present. It starts with establishing an intention and a foothold. The intention is the ultimate goal previously mentioned. The foothold is the daily discipline to continue building toward that goal with the question that is Rule #1 - “Is what I am currently doing aligned with my ultimate goal?” This is the trick to it. Asking yourself that question inspires you to assess how your life is currently structured and figure out where the weaknesses are in your current thinking toward your approach to your life.
For instance if you are working a job that is not satisfying, where you cannot practice engaging in creative problem solving of some sort, where you cannot develop a practice of excellence, where you are not learning skills that you can later use for your own purposes then maybe you need to consider looking around for a different job that will bring you some long term benefit or knowledge.
Creatives will often look around for positions where they are getting some long-term benefit such as making connections with the right people, building a network, getting a ‘behind the scenes knowledge’ of how a certain kind of business works. It is a benign form of espionage – intelligence gathering. These kinds of benefits are value added to your toil in the workplace.
Think like a creative, if you have to work, do it like a research project for your own benefit. If you are a writer for instance and you have to work anyway, go work somewhere that will be subject matter for your next novel. Work as research. If there are skills you want to develop, find a job that will pay you while teaching you those skills. Do you want to eat well as part of your creative lifestyle? Get a job in a gourmet kitchen and learn how to work it to your future benefit. A waiter job might make more money but a kitchen job might gain you more skills for your future lifestyle.
This is an example of using rule #1. Design all your choices in life around building toward your ultimate goal. A lot of the time people find it hard to prioritize their desires and decisions. Always go back, over and over again to the question: “Is what I am currently doing aligned with my ultimate goal?” If the answer is ‘no’ then start reconceptualizing your various activities to get things in alignment with the goal.
One thing to remember about the goal is the word ‘self-sustaining’. That is the only word in the goal that makes that goal difficult to achieve because it means deriving your living directly from your own self-generated creative endeavors. The caveat here is, as you go along, you may find that you can create businesses that may not be exactly what you first had in mind but can become part of the self-sustainment of your creative lifestyle.
Let’s say part of your lifestyle vision is to live in a mansion. What if you created a bed and breakfast out of it to pay for it, use the garage for your studio and then use the whole place as your personal gallery. Or do workshops in it or private parties. There are all sorts of things you can dream up. That’s what being a creative is all about. A business itself can be your blank canvas or your performance piece. It can be an ‘art project’. You don’t have to make a career out of it, it can be a 5-year project and maybe you can sell it off as a business to somebody.
I have jokingly commented that an artist has to be smart enough to keep going and naïve enough to think something will come of it. Reasoned intelligence will tell you to just stop following your creative drive and go do something more certain to financially succeed like be a brain surgeon or a Wall Street stockbroker or something. But having a lot of money is not necessarily a sign of success, it might be a sign of failure if you are not following your own path in life and took a different trail out of fear or lack of faith in yourself.
When I was in college in my late teens or very early 20’s I went to visit one of my teachers in his studio. He was sharing a rented basement with another artist. The other artist was there finishing some paintings that had sold to Nieman Marcus, a fancy department store in Texas. That seemed impressive to me but he said he was thinking about quitting painting and do something else for a living and I thought: ‘What? What kind of artist would choose to stop being an artist? It didn’t make any sense to me.
While you want to develop some business savvy, in my opinion, if you are an artist, you are an artist and that’s just the way it is. You don’t stop being an artist just because you don’t see it as a viable business. But maybe I am one of those naïve people as I mentioned earlier that thinks something will come of it.
Living a creative lifestyle is something you can do all your life. It is just a matter of committing to engaging in it on a daily basis as a way of living and making room for it in your life. Whether you ever exhibit your work in public or sell it or make a business from it does not matter as far as working at it goes. There does not have to be any end goal of making it economically sustainable.
It is one thing to pursue a creative life and another thing to pursue a creative living.
Your quotes at the beginning are from sources that I often read.
And I’ve had times when I wasn’t able to make art-in the physical sense-because of having to work at what I called my job job. For 15 years I made art in my head, on the road for work in my car, in various other spaces, and when I was able to go back to teaching at uni I felt a fraud, til I realized that I was an artist because that’s what I was no matter and it was unavoidable and un-void-able. And your piece today resonated.
Beautifully said, Cecil thank you for articulating these difficult realities so eloquently.