Shaping Your Environment
Journal Entry: Sunday, March 3, 2024
Shaping Your Environment
Each of us lives in our own environment which is the surroundings or conditions in which a person lives or operates. Most of us live in whatever environment we happen to find ourselves in. But as artists, we have the ability to imagine and shape our environment if we decide to do so.
I am thinking of the environment not as a place but rather as a set of conditions and circumstances which are, by nature, dynamic. An artist’s environment is often in a state of flux. This environment is composed of relationships with others, economic conditions both on the micro and macro levels, mental and emotional conditions, one’s personal capacity in terms of time, space, skill, discipline, supplies, tools, materials, organization and many other elements. All of it together forms your environment inside and out.
There are some things that are or seem beyond our control but most things an artist can ‘shape’. Shaping your environment can be compared to the strategies of shaping a battlefield.
The first and foremost element is shaping conditions so that battles and conflicts do not arise; to shape success prior to the outbreak of conflict. On an individual creative level this would be to identify resistance within oneself and to apply diplomatic techniques to oneself to overcome resistance to achieving your goals.
Diplomacy is the art of dealing with people in a sensitive and effective way. The thing is, an artist must practice on oneself first in order to be effective with the other relationships in your orbit that include family, friends, co-workers and business partners such as gallery relations and all of the other random relationships we have around us on a daily basis.
So starting with ourselves, which is the epicenter of our environment, how we treat ourselves, how we deal with ourselves is the beginning of our domestic policy. What are our policies about dealing with our own resistance to our own lifestyle? It is kind of a funny idea when we think about it that way. What is our philosophy about dealing with ourselves as our own population? Autocratic, dictatorial, aristocratic, democratic, socialist, communist, libertarian, anarchist, corporate? What are the other forms of self-governance?
Check out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_forms_of_government
If you think about it, each of us is our own private country with its own built in extremely sophisticated, interwoven systems and infrastructure on physical, mental, emotional and spiritual levels. Physically, they say we are composed of nearly 100 trillion living things that make up our body with about 90% of them being immigrants (microbes). Who is our ‘person’ or ‘leader’ in this country we find ourselves in? Who is the head of this government of ourselves?
https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/human-microbiome
If we think of ourselves as some kind of sovereign nation, what kind of a nation are we on a personal level as an individual? What is our domestic policy (toward ourselves) what is our foreign policy (toward everyone else)? In a certain way, you could look outwardly at every form of how nations work and see them as a group of collective individuals with their own personalities, behaviors, attitude, etc. Everything any nation deals with in terms of self-governance we each, as individuals, have to deal with on a personal day to day level.
So when you think about it that way, all of us have very complicated lives that we mostly don’t exert any control over because we don’t have our internal policies clearly worked out. We all have our own policies that we are living by but it is usually a big mush or pile of accrued random mental notes on how to go about living our lives mostly as barely conscious reactions to things that have happened in the past. We typically have not written our own declaration of independence or constitution for our selves that lays out in a clear way how we intend to live our lives. If we don’t, then life is just happening to us. As artists we need to be Life Happening.
Since I am an American I am using American documents as my examples here. So, let’s take those documents for a moment. Here is the Declaration of Independence. Read it here:
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
This document mostly sets out a dream of freedom and self-governance then spends a lot of time identifying and complaining about the oppression they have been suffering as the cause for their discontent and then state their commitment and intention about working toward the freedom they are seeking even though they really have no idea how they are going to pull it off. This is a kind of manifesto or mission statement.
Then there is the Constitution https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript
Which lays out how they are going to establish order and governance as a new country – all the boring stuff – but still, extremely important for the practical day-to-day slog of keeping things functioning.
Then, as an afterthought, they realized that they needed to make some amendments to establish citizen and states’ rights if they wanted the People to agree to go along with the constitution. I especially like #9
“The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
Read the Bill of Rights: https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights-transcript
So, if we artists think of ourselves individually as a bunch of sovereign nations, what are your documents and policies and internal laws that you are running your country with? What principles and theories are you trying out? Who is in charge of what?
It might be interesting to write your own set of self-governing documents and then try to live by them and keep making new amendments to it as needed when you see room for improvement.
For every artist, everything boils down to how are we going to work out our creative lifestyle. The creative environment is a delicate balance. The artist’s life as a whole is the main artform an artist is working on - shaping the environment.
