Sculpting Your Life

Do you ever think about how you want your life to look?? Like an artist?? What kind of art are you making?

It seems to me the most common art being created today – using this metaphor of living our lives as creating art – looks more like construction or craft.? It’s very additive.?

Does that resonate with you?? Do you think about the next big thing you’re going to do?? A vacation, a new business, new job, new car?? Do you think about adding technologies or techniques to your work, or new personal development methods to your life?

This additive method reminds me of building something like a table.? Think about building a flat-pack table.? It comes in a box, all the components, tools, fasteners, and instructions are (hopefully) there.

Set the tabletop on the floor.

Put a leg in the proper spot on one corner.?

Thread the provided washers on the provided bolts.

Insert the bolts through the holes and tighten with the wrench.

Repeat the process with the remaining three legs and turn the table over.

Et voila – a functional table!? It does the job, but building the table required virtually nothing from you.? Just pay the price, follow the directions someone else wrote for you, put in a little time and effort, and you have something that does the job.

For many of us, that’s just not enough.

There’s something inside of us that says, “I was made for more.? I was made to live a beautiful life – one that helps others, inspires others, and makes me feel fulfilled.”

Creating that sort of life requires more than just following the instructions and putting together pieces that were provided to you.? At its foundation is a uniqueness that, as it turns out, can only be found inside you.

That’s also the nature of the truly artistic.? One who brings out something from inside and shapes it into a work of art.

So what’s a better comparison?

Painting is additive, like building.? A painter might take a blank canvas, and apply various colors with different layers and techniques, until there is a finished piece.

Sculpting with clay is an act of shaping, reshaping, adding, removing, and then finally solidifying by placing the piece under intense heat in a kiln.

Sculpting stone is a subtractive art.? Starting with a block of, say, marble, the sculptor removes and removes and removes, until what’s left is the work of art.

Performance art – music, dance, theater, etc. – is a different animal altogether.? Movements, notes, words are stitched together in a moment in time, and are then gone.? Sure, you can record them, but the art is in the performance.

So, which type of art is the best comparison for how to live that beautiful life?

Trick question.? There’s no right answer, for to claim a right answer denies the uniqueness of each of us…

For what it’s worth, I look at it this way:

Life as art should not be all additive and not all subtractive.? We add things into our lives to be functional, we remove other things to reveal hidden beauty.

Life should have some of that “moment in time” sense.? We all live for a time, and then are gone, and eventually even the memory of us fades.? And when we’re gone, there is room for other lives to show their beauty.

Life should be useful, and there is beauty in that usefulness.

I’m somewhat partial to woodworking and enjoy the art that exists in a beautiful piece of wooden furniture.? Remember the flat-pack table from earlier?? Here’s a contrast:

• A 100-year-old maple tree reaches the end of its beautiful functional life and is taken down
• The four-foot-wide base is milled into three-inch-thick slabs
• A special slab is selected for its unique quilted figuring, and even for a few key flaws that add character
• The slab is planed and sanded to remove the chatter marks from the milling process
• The bark is removed, and the wood underneath is sanded to preserve the “live edge” look
• Through a careful, thorough, and loving sanding ?and finishing process, the slab-now-tabletop gets a smooth-as-glass finish that shows every ounce of character that tree could give it
• Legs are sculpted and fashioned from the same tree and are joined to the tabletop such that the whole table looks like it could have been one piece to start with

It took substantially more time, effort, and cost than the flat-pack table, but all that care and effort is what makes it worthy of being considered art.

What’s the lesson here?? Let me ask you:? Does there need to be a lesson?? Does beauty require a lesson or explanation?? How about your life?

Maybe we can just wrap it up by saying, “Invest care and effort into living a beautiful life that doesn’t require explanation.”

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(Note to any woodworkers out there who scrutinized the photo:? Yes, I’m aware that the pictured table is not maple, was laminated rather than using a single slab, and has a base fashioned from steel rather than matching wood.? But it’s nice nonetheless and gets the point across…)