[100] Art as Life

Listening to music reminds me there are so many careers in the arts that were possible only because the artist threw caution to the wind and pursued his art without regard for the future. I remember rejecting the idea of becoming a studio musician or a commercial graphic artist because those sounded like regular jobs and none of my heroes had to my knowledge done such things. Of course they probably had, most of them, I was just unable to draw the line from my heroes doing whatever they could to keep their skills up to my heroes becoming stars.

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I wrote that a year and a half ago, well before I met the artist. The artist threw caution to the wind when very young and has followed a unique and incautious path since. By and large, it's worked out for her, and a portion of my fascination with her stands on her willingness to live so incautiously. Indeed, everyone who knows her knows her as a force of nature, brilliant in disparate fields, and enjoying life more than anyone else they know.

When I read or listen to music and reflect on the people my age who have made a success out of creating these things, I see all too clearly how strongly I was held back by my fears of failure. Somehow I grew into a very conservative young man that would not take risks. I took some: I rode motorcycles without helmets. But I was horribly shy -- I was afraid of people, really -- and this stopped me doing just about anything but taking some joe job and riding motorcycles. I wrote, but never pushed it into wherever people were reading. I noodled on my trumpet, but never accepted invitations to play.

In hindsight, mine was an attitude fatal to a creative life. I dreamed of getting it together "someday". But we all know someday never comes. And it seems to me that it is really easy to get into the habit of waiting for someday to come, and meanwhile doing whatever it is you think you're supposed to be doing to be practical.

I'm fairly practical. I have two engineering degrees, an ex wife in a large house, and countless unmet dreams of being an artist to prove it. Even yet I bury myself in practicalities. But I do it badly: Slowly and in a disorganized fashion managing my dead father's estate and still-unpaid taxes, living amongst his accumulated objects unwilling to discount their intrinsic value against my time and space, working long hours to make up for work time spent not working (as now). An external observer might wonder what I am so afraid of, that I distract myself with such a mountain of unfinished business. But I don't think I fear the next step, so much that I'm not quite as practical anymore, and living more like an artist. Or perhaps like a child: Less cautiously, and less concerned with outcomes.

And nothing wrong with that really; except a part of me knows that incautious living has its costs and faith is not always met. I'm a worrier, apparently. I worry about people I know who live more like artists (and children). I have a sense, quite unscientific, that if you surveyed people who are impoverished and don't have a mental illness, you would find a large proportion of artists.

This sense means I haven't really changed much. I still don't take certain risks. I still choose to see the costs and the pain associated with risk-taking more clearly than its benefits. I might as well accept that, and at least seek to be content, whether or not I can give air to the artist.