Dungeons and Difference
The Kindness of Art
I suffered from a lot of abuse as a kid, so I can’t say I experienced much kindness, except perhaps from a few of my teachers. As a result, I tend to get overly sentimental about seemingly trivial acts of kindness as an adult. For example, when I was a teenager I worked at the local pharmacy, and worked full time as soon as I turned 18, so this meant napping during Calculus. A frequent customer. an aways-cheerful Irish woman, noted my constant presence; so I explained that, while I got a full scholarship for tuition, I was still on the hook for room and board at college. At this, she suddenly frowned, and started rifiling through her purse, all while shaking her head and saying, “I pay for my dauhter to go to school, and she’s not the least bit grateful, but here you are showing up every day with a smile on your face.” She then produced a $20 bill which she slid across the counter and said, “buy yourself a soda,” and winked at me. Even now, thinking about this event from nearly 15 years ago makes me well up a bit.
I’ve decided that I’m going to stop attempting to pathologize eveything about my life, so I’ll keep it to this: I have a lot of hurdles which I’ve adapted to and then subsequently became a victim of my own success. In recent years, particularly the last 6 months or so, I’ve taken to meditation, and I’ve learned a lot (obvious disclosure aside, the more you meditate, the more you realize you don’t know about mediatation.) The hardest thing though is self-kindness—or compassion, which had been a barrier to my participation up to this point. There is a relationship between self-kindness and effort: the more effort I exert, the more critical I am of myself. Conversely, the more compassionate I am to myself, the less effort I need to put in. I’m trying to get to the place where I can effortlessly just be.
I’ve often made creative forrays. When I was a teenager, I was a fairly capable musician, composer, and even poet. In retrospect, I realize that these pursuits served as a form of meditative practice at the time. I’ve always found the visual arts impenetrable, save for pottery. Why is that? Well I know now: I can’t let go of my expectations. That is of course when I’m trying. When I’m goofing off with my kids and drawing yetis and goblins, I don’t care; I can leave my ego at the door and just be. When that happens, the pen flows, and I’m happpy with the product. And so, I’ve taken up drawing in pen and ink as a form of meditative practice, a final boss of sorts. And so far it behaves as expected: when I sit down to practice, I can’t do anything; when my 80-lb dog that’s afraid of rain was lying on my lap and I grabbed my sketchbook, I could produce something I was almost proud of.
So, this is where I actually meant to start, but I’m glad that this is where I end. I could very well just go on as it were and just draw little sketches and doodles for the entertainment of my children, but I do admire a number of artists, and so I do want to get some insight from trained artists. My favorite books and videos on the subject so far have all brought me to tears, and why is that? They’re all words from total strangers telling my my worst fears about myself, and telling me to be kind to myself. That distant reach from a trained artist to the unknown, unseen amateur. They’re people that have been on this journey for far longer than me, and understand its unenumerated secrets. Its a way of seeing the world that I aspire to. That’s something that just won’t be found in the latent space of arrangements of pixels.