What did your parents model to you about creative bliss?
Was it seen as important? Or an impossibility, to be shoved aside and boxed away, in favor of more “practical” things?
There’s a legend in my family that when my parents met, my father wanted to be an actor, but that he closed the door on that dream when my mom said she wouldn’t marry someone with the kind of unstable income that an acting career was sure to bring.
How serious my dad was about pursuing the acting bug that bit him in college I’ll never know.
Maybe it was a passing phase. Maybe he would have been happier doing community theater and making his income elsewhere anyway.
I know he loved the high-tech career he went on to build, and I certainly had a more stable home life with an engineer/systems analyst father than I imagine I would have had with an actor father.
And yet.
What do we model for our children when we “reneg on our gifts,” as my friend B puts it?
Her own mother only pursued her inborn talent for art once the kids were all grown and gone, and I could name several other friends off the top of my head whose parents closed the door on their creative dreams in order to support their families.
What message does that kind of self-denial give to a child with a burning hunger to create?
Understand that I’m not casting blame or judgement on any of the adults who made decisions they saw as necessary to support their families. We’re dealt the hand we’re dealt, and we can each only do what we think is right at any given moment.
I am, however, asking us — now — to think about it.
Many of us have the luxury to create lives our parents and grandparents couldn’t have dreamed of.
My immigrant great-grandparents escaped pogroms, sailed in steerage across the Atlantic and struggled to survive in a new world so that their children would have a better life.
Generations later, I’m profoundly grateful for the opportunities in my world that have allowed me to focus on building a business that sustains me financially, nourishes me creatively, and also changes the world.
Imagine!
Time, place and good fortune have made it a helluva lot easier for me to follow my bliss and to factor creative joy into my days than it was for my antecedents.
Although “the economy” is in the dumps and this is perhaps the first generation that hasn’t almost automatically surpassed their parents’ standard of living, we still have opportunities that simply didn’t exist for my ancestors in the shtetl.
For most of us, the path to following your bliss has never been more accessible, whether it has anything to do with how you earn your living.
And let me say here — and this is very, very important to me that you understand — living a full-color creative life has absolutely nothing to do necessarily with how you earn your living! You do not have to earn your living from your art in order to live a full-color creative life.
That’s one option, but it’s not the only option. And it’s not even the best option. That all depends on you, and what works for you, and how you are wired.
For many people nowadays, at least those with the resources to read a post like this, what’s really getting in the way is not drought, or famine, or living in a war zone, or living in a shtetl, or pogroms, it’s mindset.
The idea that we don’t deserve to pursue our creative passions. Or that doing so is frivolous and unimportant.
If that wasn’t what we were told in words, it’s often what we were told in actions.
Now let me ask you: if the adults in your life boxed up their dreams, imagine, how might your life might be different now if you’d witnessed them making time and space to follow their creative joys instead?
It must be said that a parent who follows her or his bliss to the exclusion of effectively caring for their family is no better a model than one who closes the door on that bliss entirely. But there has to be a balance, don’t you think?
In my book The Creative Sandbox Way, I include a chapter called “5 Reasons Why Creative Play is Essential (and World-Changing).” Reason number two is this:
When you create, you model for others that they can create, too.
Wouldn’t you like to live in a world where everyone grows up with this kind of modeling?
You have the power to be a model for others.
In fact, I’ve come to the conclusion that this may be my real purpose as an artist: not to make amazing art, but to model creating. Period.
I don’t have children, but I know that following my passion speaks volumes to those who know me, regardless of their age. It’s ultimately the reason why this blog exists.
And I intend to keep doing it. I hope you’ll do the same.
Now your turn. What do you think? Did your parents follow their own Blisses?
How did their model affect your mindset about your creative passions?
And what are you doing now to feed your own creative hunger and follow your Bliss(es)?
PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!
Resources In this Episode
My book, The Creative Sandbox Way
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Now go get creating!
PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!
PPS — I am SUPER excited that I’m teaching on Life Book 2017 next year! And registration is NOW OPEN. Click here to read all about it and sign up.
