A second to breathe is exactly what I've needed lately. Not that my life is in any way more busy than anyone else who's trying to pursue an artistic career, I've just come to learn than my life 'speed' is something I relish control of from time to time. I love that feeling of realizing the incredible and almost inconceivable amount of tasks on my plate, only to pause and say:
'Screw you.'
Yes, that's right. 'Screw you.' Even a college educated girl such as myself can find a reason to use less than appropriate words-both a guilty pleasure and an tipsy trend of mine. I just despise how the majority of our society has come to understand our lives as something other than just that. Our lives. So many times I've sat down with folks from generations past and heard them speak of all the things, or maybe just the one huge thing, that they always wanted to do and totally missed out on...
Well, I don't want to be that person. And though I completely realize and value the importance of many successive days of intense work, I've started to realize that I need a second to stop and breathe just as badly.
Take this for example: As I type this I'm sitting in bed, drinking a beer and eating a leftover samosa out of a bowl and listening to the sounds of springtime outside my window. Now what could be more perfect than that? Honestly. This little bracket of time probably wasn't destined to be in my schedule for the day, but dammit, I'm glad it is. Doing human things makes me feel more human, and I'll be damned if I spend the rest of my adult life like a robot-running around fretting over minute details, blurting out meaningless words just to fill spaces, and losing sight of everything beside the things that won't matter in thirty minutes anyways.
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That said, why is it that figuring out what we truly care about and want to devote the largest portion of our time to is the hardest thing ever?
I've spent a large portion of my days since the beginning of the year thinking about what it is that truly motivates me and makes me happy. Not anyone else-just me. And although I've come up with a handful of answers, I could never bear the thought of crossing one off the list to make more room for any of the others. This paired with my uncanny knack for falling in love with every new skill or trade I'm introduced to doesn't exactly make things easier in the 'determining the life path' department. So where does that leave me you ask?
I could move in any direction as long my next home is located near some sort of water. And frankly, with the general status of things in the US, I've been considering hopping on a plane and holing up in Europe for awhile. But without something to love and do and care for, what is location anyways?
So that takes me right back to the original question-what do I love enough to commit all my energy to doing?
In a general sense, I guess making things would be the answer. I love to work with my hands and am good at it too. It also makes me happy. But making things around people has always been difficult for me...I can't stand the looking over the shoulder feeling for any length of time, and I don't like to put my works in progress on display. So that narrows any life venture to a collaboration with only a certain few highly regarded folks around. But then how does one figure out how to combine his/her life passions if they aren't (un)fortunate to have just one love?
-Music
-Visual art
-Writing
-Cooking
-Growing and tending to things
-Building/restoring things
So those are my top 6 loves. Sounds simple enough, but lord knows that each one can be broken down into 10 categories of their own. Take visual art for example:
Visual art:
-photography
-printmaking
-painting
-papermaking
-ceramics
-film
-mixed media ventures
So now there are 7 more avenues, and this is why I've always been totally overwhelmed by questions like 'So what's your next plan?' or 'What do you see yourself doing in 5 years?' or 'Wow it looks like you do a lot of different stuff, what kind of music/art do you like the best?'. I usually stutter and blurt out something sort of educated about goals and dreams and the like, but what I really want to say is:
I HAVE NO IDEA.
Followed by:
AND THAT'S O.K.
Because it IS. And though it's taken me years and years to learn this, I'm still no better off. The questions still bother me and my answers do the same. The only comfort is the idea that there are other young artists out there going through exactly the same thing. They may not publish their inner rants online, but you know what?
IT'S O.K.
