Title - Book notes: Your Life as Art, by Robert Fritz Tags - writing draft booknotes
You can create your life in the same way an artist develops a work of art.
You can conceive of the life you want to bring into being as an artist conceives of a painting, take strategic actions to build such a life as the artist takes all the necessary actions to create the painting, and inhabit the life you want to create as the artist may hang the painting on a wall to experience it.
You can be the playwright, and also the lead actor, and also the audience for your own life play.
The creative process can be the modus operandi for your life.
Ever since prehistoric people lived in caves and decorated their walls with paintings, the creative process has been an essential characteristic of human nature.
One of the key differences between Neanderthal man and early modern humans is art. The earliest Homo sapiens made art. Neandethal man did not.
Often the arts and sciences remain as a legacy while everything else is forgotten. Not many think of the impact of Queen Elizabeth the First, but Shakespeare is still a force to be reckoned with, both as a playwright, and as a thinker who words are still quotes, studied, and treasured.
Art often confronts truth.
Art has the ability to both involve us more deeply in life, and yet, at the same time, give us objective distance so we can see our world with greater perspective.
Rather than attempting to suggest answers to questions such as ‘why do we exist’ or ‘where do we come from’, art reflects the quality of the unexplainable and the paradoxical.
As we get older, we tend to become more serious and stodgy. We tend to enjoy life less and less. We can lose touch with that spark we had when we were young (and what we often think of as stupid).
When you live your life as art, you open yourself to the spark you had when you were young.
If you don’t stay in touch with your own spark, you can lose yourself. You can live quite nicely, move through life with ease, and have a sense that everything is going fairly well, and yet still feel the lack of something important.
Often people who feel something is missing try to make up for it by looking for something outside themselves.
There is a way to reconnect with your essential nature. It is to create.
Here are some of the change stages described by Candice Carpenter in Chapters:
- The gig is up - when you try to hold on to a job, career, relationship, living situation, or the direction your life has taken - but the gig is up - change will be thrust upon you with greater and greater force until you let go.
- Falling - this is a frightening stage where you feel disengaged, disidentified, disoriented, and you ultimately fall into disorientation.
- A walk in the desert - you are able to reflect about the most existential issues in your life.
- Stirrings - all the threads of your past ultimately will be woven together as you become an accomplished creator.
- A stake in the ground - you begin to focus and then commit yourself to your new way of life.
Change is often a kind of death followed by a resurrection.
To create something new, something old must end.
When an artist finishes a painting, it is done. Next comes a new painting to create.
As a creator, your role is generative. You originate form and content that has its own wonderful reason to be, its own life, its own purpose, and its own intrinsic value.
Being a creator is a way to be involved with life at its most basic and vital essence, its deepest truth, its richest expression.
You create anyway. You can’t avoid it. If you shave, put on makeup, choose your own clothes, order food from a menu - you are making decisions that impact your life. You may not have thought of these acts as part of the creative process, but they are.
The decisions you make are critical to the outcomes you can produce.
Structure is a whole thing. It is an entity that is undivided, complete, and total. A car is a structure. Your life is a structure.
Your life may work very differently from how other people’s lives work.
Does your life structure work to your advantage, or does it somehow work against your best efforts?
There are two types of basic structural patterns people have: advancing an osciallating.
Advancing is a structure in which the success you have achieved becomes the platform for future success. You can build momuntum over time, and the sum total of your life experiences leads you forward.
In an osciallating structure the success you have created is neutralized. A step forward is followed by a step backward. Within this structure, success cannot succeed long term. If you are in an osciallating pattern, change will only be temporary.
You must learn how to keep success, build upon it, and have it lead to further success over time.
Beyond goal creating, we need to explore the quality, spirit, and meaning of your life.
We don’t always get it all at once. We need to spend time with art. Similarly, there are depths to you that are not always obvious at first glance. As you delve more deeply, you will find new discoveries, insights, values, aspirations, and depths that are so important to the final work of art that is you.
You need to learn the mechanices of the creative process. But you also need to find expression for the deepest and best aspects of your being. As you create, you learn, and as you learn, you grow in spirit and dimension.
Process is only as good as the results it serves.
Process should never be exalted, dramatised, celebrated, exaggerated, or blown out of proportion.
The only test of a good process is how effective it is within your value system.
What matters is how well you can use everything that is available to you for creating your life, not the process you are using.
Sleeping and dreaming is a place to further the creative process. Once structural tension has been internalised, your subconscious mind begins to resolve the tension you have established.
I often get ideas and answer critical questions during the night. I never have a notebook by my bed as some people do. I have trained my mind to remember the insight. When I awake in the morning, the insight that my sleeping state produced is pretty clear. If, within the first four or five house after arising, I do something with the new idea, it will stick. If I don’t, it will drift away. But I have found that if the idea drifts away, and the structural tension is still a dynamic force seeking resolution, the idea will come back.
The spirit of structural tension comes from two of the most powerful forces there are in life: love and truth.
Creators love their creations before the creation exists.
The types of love an artist experiences during the creative process is generative rather than responsive.
Artists usually don’t talk about the spirit of love they have for the work they are creating. It’s hard to talk about. And it’s such a normal and ordinary experience that, while it is special, it is very common.
Love takes many forms, not all of them inspired.
Generative love is a constant throughout the entire process.
As you manage the mechanics and deepen the orientation, you are simultaneously in a state of love that fills you with great reserve and passion.
Artists are often as tough as nails when it comes to observing reality. The cannot distort reality by making it better or worse than it is. If they did, they would not get the feedback they need to make adjustments to their process.
People who do not know many painters are often surprised by how uncompromising painters are in their truthfulness about their work.
The spirit of structural tension is generative love and truth for truth’s sake. What could be more magnificent within humanity?
Through Ad Age type images, desire becomes a strange icon. It’s too bad, for desire is such a good thing.
We need to be in touch with our real desires to form our goals.
For some people, a goal-less life - going with the flow, being spontaneous, giving up attachments, flying by the seat of their pants - is a good idea. Sometimes these people talk about the trip itself as the goal. Getting somewhere, no matter where it is, is the goal.
This is the image we get from Jack Kerouac’s great book On The Road, in which the protagonist travels and observes and find life in its many and varied phases. But Kerouac couldn’t have written his book using this freebag approach to life that his fictional anti-hero does. First he had to have a desire: the book.
The fact is we want things. We are programmed to have desires. Sometimes the things we want are very simple and immediate: food, enjoyment, a good laugh. Sometimes they are longer term: building a business, building a family, building a home, building a career. Sometimes the things we want are in reaction to circumstances: having a headache go away, being able to pay the bills this month, etc.
For some people, instrad of their desires being the organising force in their lives, the problems, obstacles, and difficulties are.
Desire, on a basic level, is a want. The primar condition of human nature is to want things. We want to live, so we therefore want air, food, and warmth.
Not all desires are created equal.
The desires that help us build our lives are self-generated. They are independent from the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
In the end, almost everyone is able to connect with their true desires.
The first and most basic questions of the creative process is: What do you want to create? i.e. What do you desire?
Many people make the mistake of thinking if they find the right thing to want, they will find the key to success, happiness and satisfaction. For these people, it almost doesn’t matter what the object of their desire is, as long as wanting this thing works. The basic flaw in their thinking is orientational. They think something outside themselves can do it for them. The trouble is that this something isn’t there. It’s a mirage. It doesn’t exist.
The idea that money will filfil your true desires is an illusion. While there is nothing wrong with having financial goals, and nothing wrong with being rich beyond your wildest dreams, don’t expect that realising these goals will bring you happiness.
The notion that something outside yourself can make you happy is not limited to money. For some people, it’s finding their life’s work.
There is a variation on something outside myself… and this is something inside myself, which when found, will make me happy. The form is the same: feel incomplete, presume that there is something that needs to be found, search for it and hope to find it.
Some people go in the opposite direction and try to give up their dreams, try to be unattached, and try to be desireless. The irony is that the desire to give up desire is a desire.
To try to find the right desire is the wrong approach in creating your life as art. You won’t find it. You can’t build your life around it. You will simply fall into the trap of being indecisive.
No matter how much you might want to love someone you don’t love, the fact is that you don’t love that person. We do not choose who or what we love. True desire is a form of love. Just as we can’t force ourselves to love people we don’t love, we can’t force ourselves to want what we don’t want.
Once we understand our desires, we may make choices around them, but the desire itself is not the subject of choice. You want what you want because that is what you want. And it’s hard to organise your choices around things that you don’t care about, or that at least don’t lead to things you care about.
If you thought you needed to find what it was you desire, and you went on a search and find mission, the true desires you actually have would become invisible to you.
Knowing what you want isn’t a revelation that suddenly opens the door to success, happiness, victory, or anything else. It’s simply an understanding about what’s most important to you.
The job of desire is not what it can do for you. It’s more a factor of what you can do for it.
If you haven’t organised your life around your true desires, I recommend that you do. Let them become the foundation for your life-building process.
Passion, like inspiration, is a temporary phenomenon. All artists know: inspiration and passion have their moments, and then the moment passes.
What do you do on days your are not inspired, if you only can feed off of inspiration?
Creators know very well how to work on the many, many days when they are not inspired nor filled with passion. The source of their motivation to create doesn’t come from any particular experience they happen to be having, but from the true desire to bring a work to completion.
Following your passions sometimes leads to terrible results - think of crimes of passion.
Passion is not an essential factor in true desire. At least not when it is described as a type of emotional or inspirational response.
I finally found that the answer is still ‘I don’t know why I want to write music.’ And, I don’t need to know.
In the end, how does one explain love? You can’t, not really. You love because you love, not because of other things.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning in a series of letters between her and Robert. ‘… I love you because I love you…‘. The idea: love for love’s sake only.
This is passion that lasts, that does not change when feelings change, that transcends the shifting circumstances in which we might find ourselves.
I don’t need to find the profound love I have for my family. I couldn’t write a mission statement and say anything rational to explain how or why I feel as I do for them. It is beyond words.
Your passion is not a response. It is simply there if it is there. If you place no demands on it, such as casting it in the role of saviour, you can get to know it.