I decided to take a few hours to myself to decompress… so without thinking too much, I started to carve a piece of scrap wood… being led by a deep exploration…
When it comes to work, we tend to be – almost universally – highly strategic and thorough in our approach. We think extensively about where our talents and opportunities may lie, we spend years (and a fortune) on training, we devote extraordinary energy (and our most vigorous decades) to progressing up the ladder and keep a vigilant and jealous eye on the progress of our rivals.
Our leisure hours promise to be, by contrast, the easy bit. We don’t expect there to be particular complexity in this section of existence. We want to relax and have fun and tend to envisage that the only obstacles to such goals might be time and money. We adopt a welcoming, unsuspicious manner and readily take up the suggestion of others without gimlet eyed scrutiny. Sometimes, without thinking about things too much, we end up in a water park or hosting a barbecue.
What we may miss for many years is the real price of our negligence. We forget that our lives are so much less than they might be because we insist on being haphazard where we might be devotedly analytical. We stick to being guided by hearsay and muddled instinct when we should harness reason and independent reflection; we are a lot more miserable than we might be because we cannot take our own fun more seriously. And we don’t because we are touchingly but ruinously lacking in vigilance about our individuality: we assume that what will work for others will work for us too. It doesn’t readily occur to us to take our uniqueness into account.
A corrective to this highly costly absence of mind comes from an unexpected quarter: the history of artistic creation. What we call a great artistic creator is someone who, first and foremost, has learnt to take their pleasure seriously. Most don’t. They like artistic creativity of course, but they don’t drill too deeply into what they in particular, they as unique beings with a highly individual history, sensory system and temperament, are inclined to like. That is why the chief characteristic of the inexperienced is derivativeness: their artistic creativity reflects what everyone else around them tends to like and make in their particular era and circle. It’s the art of people without a capacity to take their own fun seriously.
Most of us are, by contrast, fatefully modest about what we enjoy. We don’t dare to foreground our own discoveries. What we do with our leisure hours is therefore marked by a dispiriting uniformity. We go skiing because we hear that’s meant to be fun. We invite guests around for dinner and talk about what everyone else talks about and have melon for a starter. Our weekends unfold a bit like those of all our colleagues. We die with our particular appetites and intense sensations tragically unexplored.
To save ourselves, we need the equivalent of an artistic breakthrough. We should – across the board in our leisure pursuits – be prepared to be redemptively weird. If we were to use only ourselves as our lodestar and point of reference, what would a dinner party look like? What would we eat? What would we talk about? Where would we sit? What have we – the we that’s going to be dead in a few decades and will be as though it never existed – enjoyed in the past and might we recreate going forward? What might a holiday specifically geared to our tastes and proclivities be like? What bit of the standard tourist itinerary might we ditch? Which of our hitherto stray or guilty pleasures might we dare to bring into focus and anchor our days around? What might we learn to say no to and contrastingly, to emphasise going forward?
It’s so often drummed into us that we may be selfish and should learn to relinquish our interests for the sake of the community that we fail to notice an even more horrific possibility: that in many areas, we’re not selfish enough. We fail to pay any appropriate attention to our fragile, extraordinary and scarce nature. We don’t give outward expression to our true sensations. We don’t give our weekends and our spare time the imprint of our own characters. We kill our uniqueness out of politeness and a fear of being odd. We spend far too much of our brief lives defending an impossible idea: that we are pretty much like anyone else.
Go on… permission to be you granted…
