Why Art.

Why art.

There are times when I sit down to write, and… nothing comes out.

The day to day of life has me spinning so out of control that I can’t even get a handle on an outside thought. Sometimes too much happens within a day or week to even process it all, and I’m just left feeling, well, nothing.

I’ve stood silent and empty in front of my own home as it burned to the ground. I’ve stood over the dead bodies of loved ones as I know I’m supposed to say good bye, and yet I can’t even begin to channel the emotions I know I’m supposed to be feeling. I’ve closed off from bitter disappointment and walked tepidly through success I wasn’t sure I was ready to enjoy or celebrate yet.

Then I’ll sit down alone to watch a movie or listen to a song or read a book, and the flood gates will open. I’ll be overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of that other world that I’ve been exposed to. Like two strings that will vibrate together when the same note is struck, something deep within me will reverberate back whatever that art just expressed and I’ll fall to my knees in tears.

Sometimes life is just too fast, or confusing, or big or awful or wonderful or amazing to process it all at once. Yet in art we can find these slices of condensed life and we can digest that. That sliver of raw emotion and insight can knock over a set of dominos that has been building in us work day by work day, errand by errand, difficult week by difficult week until they roll over each other in a numbing row of freezing waves that crash against our psyche and stretch into gray months that seem to have no meaning.

Then in that one moment of clarity, we will see our hearts, and it will shatter us in the sweetest release of anguish and the bitterest tears of bliss.

And that is why, even if we don’t become celebrities or stars or some other lauded notion of what success might be, we can create. We can touch others. As long as we give of nothing less than our absolute everything. For to hold back is to be disingenuous to ourselves and to anyone that we might share it with.

So art.

Art to make sense of your world. Art to help someone else make sense of theirs. And you might never even know how or where or to what magnitude you ripple against another person’s soul, but as long as you gave with all you were capable, then you did as much as a human being could do.