To Be An Artist (or a Happy Human) Maybe Learn to Let Yourself Be Lucky
A couple of weeks ago, I covered a protest/rally for our paper, The Bar Harbor Story. I took a lot of photos, which meant a lot of moving around the town’s village green.
I squatted. I stood near a gazebo. I sat in the grass. I circled the perimeter. I took a lot of photos from all different positions.
I also walked back and forth from our town’s Village Green to my house. There were a lot of people on the streets, hanging out, enjoying the magic that is Bar Harbor, Maine.
“So?” you’re probably wondering. “Who cares, Carrie?”
Well, when I went to the bathroom at home, I pulled down my pants (this is important for the story, I swear), and it was at this point that I realized that I had worn my pants inside out.
How did I learn this?
I saw pockets.
These were not yoga pants or sweat pants. Nope. These were cargo pants. And I didn’t notice for hours that they were on inside out.
Imagine these but more pockets:
And, fortunately, I found this pretty hysterical. But that’s kind of the thing. I could have been horrified and gasped more than twice (I did gasp, which is not something you should really do in a bathroom with thin walls). I could have cried and thought that I could never go out again, but I chose not to. I chose to decide that I was pretty lucky to have noticed before I actually did go out again.
When I was a little kid, one of my dads (my papai) would tell me, “You make your own luck.” When something bad happened in my little kid world, say my glasses broke, he’d help me reframe it into something that wasn’t quite so end of the world as my natural inclination. He’d say, “Cool! Now you get new classes.” Or sometimes, “Cool, tape looks cool on glasses. You’ll be the coolest kid in second grade.”
Luck, he thought, was something you cultivated and grew. But, here’s the thing: my dad was biased toward optimism. And that was a tremendous gift that he gave to me when it comes to both luck and creativity.
Our brains tend to go toward the bad. I see it all the time in my town and beyond it. Social media posts decry the end of the world for multiple reasons and in multiple ways. Chaos becomes bigger than it actually is.
Psychologist Richard Wiseman wrote “The Luck Factor.” He wrote that back in 2003. And a lot has been written on his thoughts since then.
As Scientific American’s Michael Shermer explains, “Wiseman began by testing whether those who believe they are lucky are actually more likely to win the lottery. He recruited 700 subjects who had intended to purchase lottery tickets to complete his luck questionnaire, which is a self-report scale that measures whether people consider themselves to be lucky or unlucky. Although lucky people were twice as confident as the unlucky ones that they would win the lottery, there was no difference in winnings.”
If you believe you are lucky, you might not win the actual lottery, but you live life with more hope and confidence and that starts to impact other things. How optimistic you are can be related to how lucky you became.
Or as Tim Denning wrote, “Optimism lifts the veil on reality. It helps us imagine outcomes that don’t exist. It lets creativity thrive instead of being suffocated by pessimism.”
When I came home and realized how amazingly inside-out my cargo pants had been, I didn’t think, “Oh, man, I’m losing it.” I didn’t even think, “Oh no! People must have been making fun of me.” I thought, “I am so glad I noticed and whew—I am so glad nobody was mean to me about this.”
Optimism and luck and creativity are often connected. We write, paint, draw, make, build, sing, and it’s a gift to the world, a hope that our gift will be accepted.
Creativity can be impacted by negativity, too. Sometimes we put so much pressure on production or “worth” or whether things are good enough that we stop creating joyfully at all. Sometimes the events of the world pulls us out of those creative places.
But we have to fight that.
Four years ago, on her blog, author and innovator Julia Cameron wrote about creativity.
This was not an unusual move for her.
She was always writing about creativity, but this entry began,
“To be an artist you must learn to let yourself be. Stop getting better. Start appreciating what you are. Do something that simply delights you for no apparent reason. Give in to a little temptation, poke into a strange doorway, buy the weird scrap of silk in a color you never wear. Make it an altar cloth, set your geranium on it, frame it—try letting yourself be that nasty, derogatory little word, “arty.” Drop the rock. A lot of great artists work in their pajamas. Ernest Hemingway and Oscar Hammerstein both worked standing up because they liked that.”
She went on to write, “Sometimes we get a lot further in our art and in our lives when we let ourselves do a little of what comes easily and naturally. If you like to draw horses, stop drawing chairs. If you would love to take ballet, do it and let modern jazz be someone else’s winter sport. If you have a deep love for Broadway, tell Chopin you’ll be back.”
So, find a way to let yourself be optimistic, to be lucky, to be creative.
Find a way to go back to the joy of creating.
Find a way to go back to the love of creating that you once had.
Just be.
Just be lucky. Just be optimistic. Just be creative. And to hell with it if you wear your pants inside out. It doesn’t matter at all.
Along the same lines, I was reading a bit of Steven Pressfield (The War of Art, The Daily Pressfield, etc.) this morning. He suggested all of the traits that hold artists back are mostly mental. Traits like fear of failure and fear of success. Fear of the new, fear of pain, of loneliness, of exertion, of intensity. The constant need for third-party (external) validation. Feelings of self-doubt, arrogance, impatience, and an inability to defer gratification. Predisposed to distraction, shallowness of thought and purpose, conventionality, insularity, and the need to cling to the known.
Similarly, potential strengths are also mental. These include traits like courage, honesty (particularly with oneself), self-confidence, patience, humility, and compassion for oneself and others. They also include the ability to receive criticism objectively, curiosity, open-mindedness, and receptivity to the new. They include the ability to focus and defer gratification, a strong will and mental toughness, and the capacity to endure adversity, injustice, and indifference. These capacities are available to everyone.
From my view, I see these two mental approaches as pessimism vs. optimism.
Happily, I also choose the latter over the former – it’s a happier existence!
Maybe you have brought back an old trendy fashion?