Every artist has a muse and mine apparently lives in my bathtub. Whenever I have some serious thinking to do, I have a soak in the tub. I usually end up with an answer to a question I didn’t ask, but probably should have.
Today’s Bathtub Epiphany was about positives and negatives; success and failure; black and white.
Ask almost anyone and they’ll agree that it’s easier to believe something bad about yourself than something good. Tell a person they’re a failure once and they’ll probably never forget it because that’s gospel. Tell a person they’re a success and you’ll likely have to keep telling them because ‘you’re just saying that.’
Tell a woman she’s beautiful and she’ll likely deflect the compliment by pointing out the flaws you’ve missed; tell her she’s fat….. Dear God. The scar will never fade.
Why is it that we’re so much more receptive to the things that make us unhappy?
I have a black and white dress with skulls and roses on and it happened to be hanging up in the bathroom while I was having my soak. It got me thinking about the duality of things. Happiness and sadness. Life and death. Black and white.
It’s probably safe to say most of us live our lives in shades of grey; not too happy; not too sad. Safe somewhere in the middle. When someone reminds us of our failures, we catapult onto the dark side of the spectrum. Dark moods, anger, depression. We hang onto our shame and failure like hard-won badges of honour and no-one can pry them from us.
When someone throws us a bone and praises our creativity or success, we suspiciously stare that bone down for ages. Most of us won’t even make the attempt to go and pick it up because it must be a trap. For some bizarre reason it’s easier to hang about on the dark side than it is to step over to the light. Why is that?
If you look at the physical properties of colour, black and white are not generally considered colours at all. Black absorbs light and reflects no colour back. White absorbs nothing and reflects all the colours back. Interesting…..
Maybe that’s a bit like life. When we absorb all the negativity and crap around us, our moods shift to the dark side of the spectrum. No light is reflected back. When we let all that negativity bounce off us, we’re reflecting all of our colours back into the world.
For the longest time I’ve wanted to write. I’ve found my voice but I’ve never settled on a topic to write about, so I’ve considered myself more of a wannabe writer. I mean, you’re not a writer unless you’re published, right? Wrong.
Dead wrong. If you’re putting words on paper, you’re writing. If what’s in your head is being born onto paper and left out there, you’re writing. If you put paint on a canvas, you’re painting. That makes you a painter. Maybe not a famous one, but you’re still a painter. To be who you want to be, you need to BE who you want to be. Not think it. Not dream it. BE IT.
We absorb the colours of expectation and then tie our dreams to those anchors. Then we cry in agony when those dreams sink away from us and never fully accept that we had a hand in drowning them. Every little thing I thought I had to be has dragged me further into the darkness and further away from the goal. It wouldn’t surprise me if half the population has the same problem. We’re so focused on every single expectation others have of us that we have no room to reflect on what makes us uniquely capable. We’re here, now. THAT makes us uniquely capable.
Our clocks will run out soon enough and at that point, the space we occupy in the world will shrink. What will remain is what we created. So create. Have no expectation other than the pleasure you will get from it. Your creation doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. It doesn’t have to fund your life. It doesn’t have to do anything other than make you happy and exist.
If you want to paint, then do it and hang it up. There you go, your art is adorning the walls! If you want to write and be published, then write and publish it yourself on Kindle, or wherever. We can do that. Take the photos, create a Facebook page for them or whatever takes your fancy. Cook the gourmet meal on a week night & be the chef you’ve always wanted to be. Why wait until you can cook for strangers when you can start now, cooking for people you love. Stockpile all your secret recipes for that cookbook you’ve wanted to do for the last however many years. Decorate your sanctuary, even if it’s just a room and hone your internal decorating skills. Create it and leave it out there but don’t weigh it down with expectation.
Gone are the days when the Gates to Creativity were manned by publishers, producers, art directors and the like. The Gate is still there, but what we’ve failed to realise is, there’s no wall on either side of it anymore. Walking through the Gate isn’t necessary when you can walk right past it to the same destination. The destination that you build for yourself without needing their damn permission to succeed.
