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Chasing Passion Throughout Life

One of the most important things in life is passion. I’ll never forget this quote from Atlas Shrugged: “The only man never to be redeemed is the man without passion.”

Sometimes I feel like I have too many passions. Is that really possible? More often than not, I feel like Bilbo Baggins—thin and stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread. My life is a perpetual struggle of balancing my careers: advertising (the one that actually makes me money right now), art, writing, running marathons, academics, teaching, travel, cooking, photography… I feel like I’m always looking for a free moment to get back to practicing guitar… and of course I need to unwind and relax every now and then. Oh, and I attempt to maintain some semblance of a healthy social life throughout all this.

It’s pure insanity. When I’m doing X, I get frustrated that I’m not giving enough attention to Y and Z. When I’m doing Y, same thing about X and Z. And then I find myself all down in the dumps because I’m a deadbeat and I haven’t accomplished the things I wanted to have accomplished by now, and this and that.

I’ve been trying to prioritize my life in recent weeks, planning ahead and figuring things out. The more I think on it, the more I find that I’m unwilling to give up on any of the things I’m passionate about. It’s simply not an option. So what’s left for me is to be realistic. To make another Tolkien reference, I need to decide what to do with the time that’s given to me.

I need to realize that some of my passions will always be on the back burners… but the thing about the back burners, which we often forget, is that they’re still burning.

Because I like Kanye West a lot, I’ll illustrate what I mean using his life. The guy has a lot of passions: rapping, production, fashion, film, philosophy… And those are just the ones that are apparent to me, a complete stranger.

Even with just that short list, I’ve noticed something important. Let’s consider his passion of fashion, and not just because that rhymes. Kanye loves fashion. You may have heard that he recently released his own line. As he revealed on Twitter, it’d been a goal of his for quite some time, and he’s put years of explicit work into launching his fashion label.

But even before he was putting in the work as a job, he was passionate about fashion. You could tell by how he dressed and the things he rapped about. You see—even though he couldn’t realize his full fashion dreams at the time, he could still feed his passion for fashion in other ways.

And that’s exactly what I’m working on. Even though I just don’t have the schedule to paint every day, I can still surround myself by art. Even though I can’t write every day, I can still appreciate all the stuff I have to read.

I can keep in touch with my passions implicitly while I can’t focus on them explicitly.

Confusing “Different” with “Better”

Gallery Night was this weekend, and it was the first time in a long time that I went. It was artistically stimulating, as usual; I had the chance to absorb the details of hundreds of works of art by established and emerging area artists.

Since I’ve been making more time to do art recently, having the chance to expose myself to a bunch of other artists (somewhere other than the Internet) was helpful. But it wasn’t long before I caught myself dumping all the work I was seeing into two buckets: better and worse—than my own artwork, that is. (And it didn’t help that the people I was with kept saying things like, “Could you do that? How about that?”)

“That’s been done before—lame,” I said. Or, “This is the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. Why do I even bother doing art when there are people out there who can do stuff like this?” It was reasonable for me to consider the stuff that was “better” than mine to be almost divine work, but the stuff that was “worse” than mine just made me sick to my stomach because it was being shown on Gallery Night while my stuff hasn’t really seen the light of day. “Maybe this stuff really is better than mine,” I thought.

Eventually I came across some work that was done in watercolor with ink outlining, the same method that I’ve been working with for the past few years. The artist’s linework was far superior to mine, I thought, as were her treatment of the medium, her colors… That’s when I wanted to give up most. Her art was just so much better than mine, I thought.

But now I’ve had a few days to mull this all over, and I’ve been reminded of something I realized—or pretended to have realized—some time ago: These other artists’ work isn’t better or worse than mine; it’s just different. (And thinking about it now, it’s certainly good that my work is different than theirs, because if it were the same I’d be in an even worse place.) 

So that’s it: There is no “better” in art, just “different.” Now, I’m sure art critics wouldn’t allow that to suffice, but I do.

I don’t get into politics, but this is important

Starting new projects is scary

I’m never more terrified than when the canvas is blank. It’s the idea of that limitless potential that scares me. The thoughts of all the different things that the canvas could become, combined into one glorious impression. The greatest painting never painted. I’m always afraid that whatever I’m about to paint will never live up to that potential.

I think about this for a minute or two and then I realize, every time, that it won’t even get the chance if I never lift the brush. Reminding myself that nearly everything you can do to a canvas (especially at the start) is reversible helps, too.

It reminds me of this photo I found on Tumblr: