“Because self-knowledge is the most difficult of the arts of living, because understanding ourselves is a prerequisite for understanding anybody else, and because we can hardly fathom the reality of another without first plumbing our own depths, art is what makes us not only human but humane.”
– Maria Popova –
What a wonderful phrase, the arts of living. It’s a compelling reminder that we make our lives, they don’t just happen.
And we can shape them any way we want to.
What’s exciting and beautiful is that we can choose to be artists. We can mold and construct our lives. We can blend, shade, color our lives. We can design them from any kind of resource into something else entirely. What a gift. What an opportunity.
And, what a challenge. Because “any kind of resource” often means the hard stuff of our inheritance and the hard stuff of our own choices. To transform those pieces means we must recognize them, first, and then do the heavy lifting required to understand them intimately. Before we make any art, we have to know our medium.
And once we do, if we do, worlds of creative opportunity open up to us. How we shape ourselves and how we shape the masterworks of our relationships comes down to how willing we are to recognize our own artistry…the very best of being human.
DAVID BERRY is the author of “A More Daring Life: Finding Voice at the Crossroads of Change” and the founder of RULE13 Learning. He speaks and writes about the complexity of leading in a changing world. Connect with him on Twitter at @berrydavid.
