Moving on from turning sixty, it’s time to simply continuing living fully and being in the world as I love to be. The week started with a trip to Toronto to attend the Your Workplace Conference on the theme of creating the Engaged Workplace. Here are my reflections:
Is it time to start painting outside the lines in your ‘paint by number’ routine? I ask myself this question whenever I feel myself succombing to some unwritten rule that seems to be forcasting my decisions or life choices. These rules, have been defined by the ‘shoulds, have to’s and must do’s’ I have acquired through the years. What about you, do you suffer from the same self-imposed limitations?
Recently, my husband Jim and I participated in the annual Your Workplace Conference. Held in Toronto, the conference theme this year was ‘creating an engaging workplaces’. With that theme in mind, we as exhibitors were asked to engage conference participants when they came to visit our booth. The first task for us, attract a creative idea which would do just that. We decided to engage the artist within each person, knowing that within every individual there lurks a creative soul. Unfortunately that creativity may have been laying dormant for a few years. Our challenge was to invite it out to play.
To create our engraging booth, we purchased a three by four foot canvas, and installed this on an easle at the corner of our venue. We placed boxes of high quality markers around the easle offering everyone the tools they required to be creative. Our invitation was to ‘Paint us a Masterpiece’, simply choose your colors and add to the canvas.
As conference attendees drifted by our booth we pulled them in, asking them to dip their hand into the box of colors, add an element of their choice to the painting and make their contribution. You can imagine the responses. We heard the usual litany of ‘I can’t draw. The artist in me died in Kindergarden. There isn’t a creative bone in my body!”
The interesting thing we noticed, is that we did not ask people specifically to draw, only to add to the canvas. This could have been a line, a blob, a curly-cue, whatever. The choice was theirs to make.
So how does this experience relate to life and painting outside the paint-by number lines? With the same hesitance as our exhibitor booth visitors demonstrated, I noticed the extent to which we do not allow ourselves to fully engage in life, the hesitation to pick up a pen or brush and add new strokes to the canvas of life. Notice how you are holding yourself back in ways you do not even recognize.
Each of us is an artist. Art comes in different forms, shapes and sizes; it might be a drawing, a simple line or a bold new color; it might appear as a painting, a novel, or a creation of some other form. Whatever it is, I encourage each of you to pick up a crayon, a marker or a paint brush and add something new to the canvas of your life.
As Gordon Mac Kenzie wrote in Orbiting the Giant Hairball, begin wielding a wider brush – pure ox-bristle. Swoop it through the sensuous goo of Cadmium Yellow, Alizarin Crimson, or Ultramarine Blue (not nos. 4, 8, 13) to create the biggest, brightest, funniest, fiercest damn dragon that you can. Because that has more to do with what’s inside of you than some prescribed plagiarism of somebody else’s tour de force.
You have a masterpiece inside you, too, you know. One unlike any that has ever been created, or ever will be. And remember: If you go to your grave without painting your masterpiece, it will not get painted. No one else can paint it. Only you.
Our conference visitors did, in the end, create a masterpiece filled with doodles and swirls, suns and rainbows, stick people and animals, whatever inspired them. The result was impressive (bids for the painting are now being accepted!). Now it’s your turn to stretch a little, step outside your ‘shoulds, have to’s and must do’s’. You might be surprized at what appears – there may even be a dragon lurking there.
The Final Masterpiece
Remember this is not about perfection, imperfection is better. It is what cracks you open. As a yoga instructor said to me recently, the poses don’t have to be perfect. Lack of perfection creates cracks and it is the cracks that allow the light to come in. Let the light in. Step up- start painting your masterpiece, stretch a little, crack your life open!
Until next time…
Betty
Thanks Betty.
The work of art looks fantastic – a real community project!