Why So Serious

The problem is when I stop making the thing and start watching myself make the thing.

I have a couple decades under my belt of sitting and asking myself, why am I writing this music or why do I keep journaling, relentlessly trying to speculate my expression’s Ultimate Value in the universe. It’s only now, after years of stewing in it and exercising the start-and-stop dance one too many times, that I realize ... the correct approach is to just not ask those questions.

There are those special few people who are born into the world to make a giant fiery mark on it. The great composers and artists, the great writers, bound from birth for the history books. Some due to innovation, and some because their particular voice is paired with the talent, honed skill and fortunate timing that evokes a flash of truth which the world at that moment needed to hear. For a select fewer, the truth in their art ripples outwards through time to generations and generations beyond the place it originates from.

Then there’s the rest of us. The millions and millions of us, sitting down to express ourselves in furious bursts of inept clarity and overzealous emotion — striving, scraping for handholds on the side of a cliff that we will never scale, no matter how hard we try. Because we have not been marked. At least, not for the misty peaks we are struggling to reach. And today, living in a highly-competitive society surrounded by an overabundance of curated excellence shoved down our throats through our technology, it feels like our precarious purchase on the rock could crumble away at any moment.

It’s a strange dichotomy. We collectively agree that these bright human sparks are genuinely inspiring, inarguably necessary to ignite creative passion in all of us. Yet by fixating solely on the value or achievement associated with their works, we swiftly overlook the more important and universal gift we carry: each of us has the capability to creatively express ourselves. In fact, if we give up the chance to do so, only then do we truly lose ourselves, abandoning who we are on the altar of excellence.

Through an obsession with artistic value-seeking, I can very easily forget that there is no set of eyes quite like mine, no set of ears that hear the world exactly in the way I do. The brush stroke or collection of notes I set down are a product of my unique mind and tell a story about what it is like to be me. If I can put the specter of comparison to rest for even a moment, I can realize that another individual’s expression of themselves in no way diminishes mine, for we are both travelers together, witnessing each other in passing.

The world of human expression would be an uninspiring landscape indeed if it were reserved for only the tallest pillars to be set upon it. Imagine no swaying trees, no rolling hills, no jagged rivers or lush undergrowth ... imagine no park benches to sit and drink coffee on or corner cafes to snuggle into. Imagine a library with only one row of books. It’s the great and the small, the finely-crafted and the strewn-about, the pieces of our world visible both at a great distance and upon close inspection, that make up a beautiful tapestry worth admiring and running our hands over.

Don’t give up your chance to add something that only you could add. Even if it’s only a single sunflower, it’s your contribution to a canvas that we are all painting on together.