Life as a Work of Art

I was reading something today about viewing one's life as a work of art. What is it that we are creating and to what end?

When I was young, there wasn't much room to be creative and develop oneself as a work of art. The people I was raised by had the idea that I would be their work of art, created and fashioned a particular way and for a specific purpose that served their needs. Of course, I rebelled against being their pet project. For a time, I viewed my life as necesarily needing to be created in the service of what others would find artistic and otherwise pleasing.

I can say that this was dissatisfying and unhealthy. Modeling oneself and ones life to be a work of art pleasing to the general population just doesn't work. Everyone has different ideas of what you "should" be and how you "should" do it. Throw the "shoulds" straight out the window.

After that, there was a period of my life where the work of art I created was in opposition to and in reaction to the expectations of how my life ought to look by other people's standards. This was an empowering period, but not particularly efficient. I say efficient because at the stage I'm at now, I'm realizing that for life to be a work of art, there needs to be some efficiency or flow to the art that you are creating. If you're stuck in indecision, angst, or are otherwise struggling to create the art that is your life, it can bog you down quite a bit. There's some good thinking that comes from it, if it's a short term process. However, I've known a lot of people who get stuck in that process to the point where it defines them, and they never manifest their life, dreams and art. Instead, they're defined by the struggle.

Somehow, by the grace of whatever powers that be, I was able to move to the point of actually creating my life authentically as a work of art. It became efficient, flowing and beautiful. One day, I woke up to realize that people thought it was created and existed simply to serve their own needs and reality, and had no realization that the creative process I engaged in the get to the point I am now actually had a purpose beyond their myopic needs.

So I find myself facing this dilemma - here's me, my life as a work of art, and me living it. We're good so far, right? But when your art becomes the false idol for someone else, in order to maintain it, you need to isolate it and render it static instead of dynamic. In other words, there's a great risk of becoming your own stereotype or one dimensional icon.

Now, I find my self restoring a doorknob. Sounds crazy as all get out, but there it is. It's symbolic in so many ways for me. I picked it up after I got a lead from a wonderful FB friend, on reclaimed building parts. I've posted pictures of said doorknob up, in various stages of renovation. Why? It's somewhat symbolic of my process of reclaiming my life as a work of art. When all else is stripped away, what remains?

In my metaphor of the doorknob, I'm envisioning rebuilding a life and home piece by piece, starting with a doorknob, without having a tangible home for it. Doorknobs, by their nature, open doors, and this is mentally what I am doing, through the tangible restoration of the doorknob. In order to have a doorknob work, I've got to envision doors and places in my life I will open them or close them. I have to envision what I will welcome, versus what I will close out. Doors by definition lead into or out of shelter and I need to consider what that shelter will encompass.

I selected this doorknob because it's so old, likely around the 1880's, from some long gone building now. Who knows where it was, or the history behind it. Why go for something old when I'm creating something new? Because my life and it's history did not begin with me. I'm the result of the ancestors that came before me, and their history has formed a foundation in which my beginnings were created.

In particular the period this doorknob represents for me is one where I believe something significant happened in my family. It was around the time when my great great grandmother passed on, and with her, some of the stories of our Cherokee lineage. When she passed on, it appears she was one of the few links that we had to that part of our family. Some stories remained and were transmitted orally to descendants, while others were not given the same information. It's created something of a hole for our family, the missing information and stories. Yet, whether we know them all or not, there's a part of us that remains dynamically connected to who we are. We can't run from it or hide from it, because it's a part of our life as a work of art.

So, my process unfolding is to reach back to times before I was born, and reclaim a part of my own history. It starts with a doorknob and reclaiming my life and lineage as a work of art. The further I go into this process, the more I find myself, as opposed to the paint I've been stripping, stripped away, bit by bit, to get to my own core.

I've never been one to collect things or work on them for the purpose of display, so at some point, this doorknob will be on a door, all my own. In the process of getting to that place, perhaps the work of art I'm creating in my life will be seen more as authentically me and less as the projection of what other people need to see my art as. Or, perhaps it will always go that way, that when you create your life as a work of art, others will have their opinions and reactions. So long as my life isn't based on feeling compelled to respond to those opinions and reactions, I think it will be good.