“You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.”
Anna Quindlen
Mockingbird Have You Heard
In case you haven't noticed, I've spent a good deal of time in this blog advising - myself more than anyone else - how to live our artistic lives with integrity and purpose. And not just our lives as artists either...but more importantly life in general. I've given a great deal of thought in the past few years to meaning and purpose...to what the point of it all is. At the beginning of the year, I began my commitment to this blog with intention and along the way, I've explored with you the heroic virtues required for our sacred quest for a good life, a worthwhile life. I've spoken about success and motivation and goals. I've even spoken about happiness as if I had some answers different from those the rest of you have arrived at on your own! In the last post, we had some great exchanges about burnout - whether it's possible to successfully market ourselves without losing our creative edge and purpose. Whatever your answer to the question was, one thing is certain - we cannot be "first rate" artists/writers if that is all we are. Even the most successful of us cannot eat, sleep, breathe and market our art all the time or I would venture to say, it soon stops being "art" and becomes "work."
Which brings me back to Ms. Quindlen...or rather to Maria Popova's blog about Ms. Quindlen's beautiful little book about life - "A Short Guide to a Happy Life." Quindlen, says Popova, "considers the question of the self and what makes us who we are, what makes us worthy of being...Even those trying to find their purpose, even those engaged in fulfilling work, and even those of us lucky enough to have no separation between “life” and “work,” can get consumed by our modern cult of productivity. Quindlen’s words come as a vital reminder of what matters, what counts, what the true aliveness of life is."
You can read the rest of Popova's blog post here: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/03/11/a-short-guide-to-a-happy-life-anna-quindlen/
And then you might want to go out an buy Quindlen's book so you can reread her beautifully intuitive advice again and again. "Get a life," she says, "Get a life in which you are not alone...get a life in which you are generous... All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough." We won't find our happiness in being or having nothing in our lives that is more important than our art or our writing. We cannot be happy if art is all we are and all we do. I think all of us know that already...but in the push to be commercially successful artists, we may find ourselves on that slippery slope at the bottom of which our art has become work and our lives are consumed with productivity and marketing, rather than an expression of our very human spirits and our desire to generously share the goodness we see all around. To be happy is to share our dreams and our passions and to inspire others to share theirs and most of all, to be truly, gratefully present to every moment we are blessed enough to have.
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