Never Walked In High Heels

I threw down my crayon with a sense of frustration and rage which could only befit a seven year old girl. Van Gogh had didn’t even have a clue the level of dismay throbbing through my body at my incapacity the create what I longed to the on canvas, or in this case the back of my father’s calculations, now turned into scratch paper for  my benefit.

“What’s wrong puppy?” my father said, barely looking up from his newspaper while using my pet name. He was used to my dramatic rampages at failed visions, even at the age of seven.

“I want to be an artist but I keep messing up and making a mistake. Now my whole picture is ruined.” At this my father raised his head from the paper spread across the floor and took my drawing to examine it under his scrutiny before asking “which precisely is the mistake?” I pointed  sheepishly to where I colored outside the lines. My hand would never obey my brain and they have never since.

My father peered it me from over his glasses and said calmly, “an artist is someone who can take their mistakes and uses them to make something special.”

Decades later I am called an artist by just about everyone I know. I write it as my occupation when asked to fill out forms. I even can admit it verbally when my profession is asked of me at ritzy cocktail parties. And yet I struggle everyday to fulfill my father’s definition of was an artist is. Hypocritical or not, I still very much wish to do nothing with my mistakes but discard them.

The greeks used to call forth the muses and the beginning of each play. Homer does the exact same in the proem of both of his epics. Shamans of ancient tribes would ask the gods to bless their creative endeavors. From the very beginning it seems, artists recognized there was something beyond their control which made the work of mere human hands approach the divine and touch lives on a scale that rehashed lines, motions, and controlled movements of a paint brush could not. The unexpected, the surprises, and the mistakes is what made work that was technically good into a great work of art. To try and iron out such unexpected features, to try and control one’s work in such a way that the unexpected is impossible, untimely stifles the work.

And yet, somehow, mistakes in  my own life and practice, glare out at me which such unforgiveness that only I could instigate towards myself. An opportunity lost, a proposal which is not accepted, a missed deadline all weigh on me to the point of near paralysis, so that I can go for months and seem to accomplish nothing.

A friend said to me last week “as an artist you need to recognize that your greatest piece of work is yourself and the life you lead.” If my life is ultimately a composition, a manuscript, a drama in in which myself is the central through line, then the mistakes I make can be used to create richness, fullness, depth that will only come from the painful and even annoying experiences which result in grace, redemption, and all the do-overs which life seems to throw at us. In God’s economy there is never a loss.

When I am listening to the world with the ears of someone who creates, I can’t help but hear a steady rhythm of truth which drums out confidently under everything else we do. There is very little which can make such a drum stop its consistent cadence, and certainly, me coloring outside the lines or missing as queue will do nothing to stop its progression. What is it that allows me to think my mistakes are so important?

There are three small boys I look after from time to time. Truth be told, I think I probably learn more from them than they do from me, but every once in a while I find I have a few pieces of wisdom to impart. The eldest is five years old and already he is well on his way to becoming creative perfectionist. Yesterday I saw him coloring an the floor looking very unhappy. His three year old brother was, on the other hand creating such a mess that it would intimidate a Texas tornado.  Finally I saw what I knew to be inevitable, the red marker went flying across the room out of sheer frustration. The boy pushed out his lips, folded his arms and sighed with such a despondency that you would have sworn he was debating the futility of life rather than drawing a picture.

“What’s wrong Scout,” I said, beginning a conversation I am now very used to having with myself.

I wish, somehow, he could learn how precious mistakes are and the boldness of failure now, at the age of five, rather than straining for years to achieve a level of perfection that even God isn’t interested in. I wish I could give him the freedom that comes from realizing that every blank sheet of paper is a new frontier and his work doesn’t have to be like anyone else’s. But at the age of five he doesn’t believe me and wads up the paper to begin again.

And I can’t really blame him. At my age there are many days where I wish I could persuade myself of the same thing.