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…very few people are artistic in life: that the art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all the arts. Who ever succeeded at draining the whole cup with grace? ~CG Jung
We live lives that are too small for us. We need to think better and bigger to give us full room for a living space—not big in consumption, which takes a lot of our time—but big in energy and the inner riches this magazine promotes. We need bigger shoes, another metaphor from Jung—maybe not quite as big as the ones in the picture—so we can grow more fully into the lives we are capable of; so we walk into lives that are replete with meaning, service, love and ample amounts of fun.
How we do this is a topic for several books. But one way to think about a bigger life is to think about an artistic life, one built on human imagination and gleaning lessons from our experiences.
This one of our core life chores—to take our work and life experiences, learn from them as best we can, and weave the lessons into an artistic and practical approach to finding some happiness, doing some good, spreading some love.
One secret here is choosing the right mix of roles and being creative with them. We need to get beyond the surface of life and live from a deeper place at least some of the time:
Here is what I mean by that.
- First, a home-based role. I am not doing laundry (surface reality), I am keeping my kids wardrobes together so they can be confident as they go to school to hang with their friends. (deeper place)
- Second, a work based role. I am making money selling at the retail level (surface reality), but I am hoping also to make a little difference in peoples’ days (deeper place) by getting them two things: the right product and a pleasant interaction.
The way we get to this deeper place in the roles we inherit and choose is to pour ourselves into the roles… it is not what we do but how we do it that expands our soul’s shoe size and gives us the artistic life. The bigger life is not the bigger house you buy, it is the bigger imagination and livelier heart you foster.
The tool for addressing this artist’s life/bigger shoes chore is the human imagination, the creative energy we can use to bring our inner essence to both work and play—where all of our endeavors have meaning because we embody the tasks, give ourselves fully to them, and let them play out the way they will.
When we do this, we get more freed up and have more of life to appreciate. Two good ways to think about this approach come from two poets, artists who studied this question all their lives:
Everyone gets the experience; some get the lesson." ~T. S. Eliot
When it’s all over, I don’t want to feel myself sighing or frightened or full of argument. ~Mary Oliver
Let’s work on making our shoes big enough, our lives artistic enough. When they have those qualities, the transformative power of the human imagination and heart turns the hum-drum aspects of our lives into the hot-diggity, the menial into the meaningful. We can turn play into less of an escape and more into a joy, and work less into a chore and more into a means of self-expression.
