Someone said that it’s important to find time for rest, or your body will find it for you (maybe it was my mum). Well, it’s 1am on a Friday morning and mine is acting as quite the petulant child. Saying that, it’s been a week of pretty much bedrest for me. There’s something in the air, perhaps, that wants us asthmatics in Liverpool off our high horses, and remind us that breathing is not a God-given right. Consider me humbled.
I suppose it’s a worst-fear come true standing at the pinnacle of the downward slope that is a busy week ahead (within that beautifully constructed timetable where you cut down travel time by running everywhere), only to have it knocked aside like bowling pins by, well, life. For me, this week it has served as a reminder that any kind of stability is an illusion. No matter how stable your job and your life might seem to be. That might be anxiety-inducing to some, but the smugly self-righteous artist in me finds it reassuring- living job to job, free, on my own path to enlightenment...you have my permission to come back and laugh at me in ten years should this backfire.
We had a chat about this in our Wicked Women meet-up this week (from what I strained to hear over Zoom, wheezing and relying on data for connection). We shared a sense (I think…) that this notion of stability is something that one is taught to work towards in life. In education we’re asked what career we will pursue, failing to prepare us for the reality that many of us will change careers, juggle multiple jobs, and get lost a lot along the way (not that the tax system takes that into account, I might add). Even more outrageous, we are fed an unconscious notion of what our personal lives should look like- pressures to ‘settle down’ by a certain date, have a certain standard of living, have the standardized and approved kinds of relationships, all packaged and polished until it gleams from every photoshopped grin on every magazine, billboard and movie. All, at the end of the day, designed to keep the economy moving and keep us buying shit we don’t need. Fuck that.
We’re not taught that sometimes, when everything is thrown in the air and our world challenged, it can be a good thing. It humbles us, reminds us that we’re alive and that we’re human. It can expose these parts of us that we’ve so carefully hidden from ourselves, those hidden cracks in the foundations.
How to move through it? I think moments like these highlights the importance of art, of creativity, in all its forms in life. My manager (for a part time job, a company that sort of gives interest-free funds to businesses working for social good…I’m not selling anything I swear, I just think it’s quite cool) originally trained as an artist before discovering her talent for finance and changing career. But she’s not a ‘sell out’ in my opinion (I feel conflicted about the use of that term because it makes being an artist more about being privileged)- she swears to the value of her artistic training teaching her how to think creatively.
Now, I’m not saying that all artists should ‘give up the good fight’ as it were and take over the finance world (no sweat, accountants, you can absolutely keep your jobs). Rather I feel the need to defend a lifestyle which might never be termed ‘stable’ but absolutely accommodates for the nature of how life really is. Poet and activist Alok talks about what it is to be ‘living beyond the binary’ and that to do so is to be ‘living poems’*. What better way is there to let go of perfection and our ‘best made plans’ than to embrace ourselves as such- as living, breathing poems? Rather than fixed works of art, living in a way that allows for all things (the good, the bad, the ugly…) to move through us and change us. Living poetically. Constantly seeking a sense of presence, the quest to find beauty in the unexpected places. Looking up at the sky, drawing something (badly), or writing at midnight because it feels right. It does not do to live as if one’s own life is already over. If you’re organised- great. What a beautiful challenge to disrupt that and get some flowers pushing up through the cracks in the concrete.
This makes me think that working as an artist (as a freelancer, I suppose, more specifically) can give one the tools to live in a way that is poetic; present and honest. Living those lessons of how to get back up again when the going gets tough, and to think expansively and with curiosity with what could otherwise be considered a ‘problem’. A career in the arts aside, this just proves to me the importance of the arts in education, not only giving tools of expression but also teaching ways of thinking that could benefit any career. This is about more than just productivity and success, but about life as a personal journey, redefining the concept of ‘you’, ‘myself’ and ‘I’ as verbs rather than fixed nouns.
At the end of the day, what is one to do when all the pins in the bowling alley have clattered to the floor (not in a ‘striiiike!’ kind of way, but in a ‘your life’s fallen apart’ kind of way, stick with me here)? Pick them back up when you’re ready but consider- what would happen were you to put them back differently? Hell, leave one in the gutter and throw another over your shoulder. See what happens.
I think I spend a lot of my time setting mine up very neatly, very stubbornly, and I think this -albeit slightly ropey- metaphor goes for a lot of creatives. There’s a sense of making everything look like it’s together. Showing off your success and confidence, in person and online, all the time. It’s almost like a defence against a world laughing at an artist for being lazy or wishy-washy or selfish, the ‘get a real job’ trope. Someone working in a stable job won’t necessarily have to do that, work is work and the personal remains personal (broadly speaking here, of course). So, this is an invitation dedicated to the creatives out there who’s pins might have all tipped over this week- I want you to know that there is no such thing as failure. Maybe your body is tired, and it doesn’t want to deal with this whole bowling-alley life-analogy right now. Learn what you can from listening to the silence after that last pin drops. Then pick everything up and try out life again.
References
*Check out the episode ‘Can We Say Bye-Bye To The Binary’ of Jonathan Van Ness’ ‘Getting Curious’ on Netflix
I work part-time for a company called Kindred-LCR in Liverpool- check it out if you want. They’ve certainly made me a little more optimistic about the future possibilities of the economy.
Cover photo is me in @francescajadeg 's production of 'Revolt She Said. Revolt Again' at Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (photo credit to @andrewabphotography )