Life as a painting, not a puzzle

Listening to a podcast recently from my fav new show called “Makers and Mystics”, I came to realize that I often look at my life as a puzzle. I have a single, fixed idea of what I want my life to become, and this picture is embodied in my core values and goals. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this picture, filled as it is with aspirations of perfection and greatness as a husband, father, artist, etc. I’m realizing that there is something wrong, however, with treating my ultimate goals as though they form a clear-cut picture puzzle which I need to piece together with rigid pieces.

                Why? Because my ultimate picture is, by definition, going to be unique- just like every human being’s picture. But in practice, I often treat my end-game picture (especially as an artist) with the assumption that it’s going to be like Dylan’s, or Young’s, or pick-your-fav-artist’s mountain top achievement. And how do I achieve greatness like theirs? By using the same building block puzzle pieces which they used: the edges of the puzzle look like a regional tour, then a provincial one, then national, etc. The ground pieces look like getting myself a manager, the sky is getting myself a publicist, etc. What, then, do I end up with? Something not unique; and moreover, expectations for my life that may not be reasonable for my unique path.

                When I lived in Vancouver 15 years ago, I was suffering in concrete ways because of looking at my life like a puzzle. I was 20 years old, just going into uni, living on my own, and generally figuring stuff out for the first time. I was often lonely and yearning for community, heaps of friends, parties, summer vacation road trips, camping, and whatnot. Being the youngest of 6 kids, I had watched as each of my older siblings flew the coop and met all sorts of cool birds. I absorbed the stories they told and probably idealized a bunch of them as I considered my expectations for my own future. I experienced the friendships, too, because a lot of these cool birds became family friends; so in a way, the promise of my future wasn’t all idealization because I had concrete proof of what could be.

                So I went to Vancouver, a place where half of my family had gone after fleeing the coop, with pretty rigid expectations: the puzzle pieces on the bottom are going to be basement suite music jams until midnight; summer will be time for camping; etc. But that wasn’t happening. The puzzle wasn’t coming together as I wanted it to. Being naturally extroverted, I’d put myself out there all the time, but I wasn’t getting the “right sized reciprocation”, as it were, to fit my puzzle. This would bog me down and make me feel like I was the problem. I thought I was loveable! I thought I was fun! I thought people would want to jam every weekend. Instead, here I am checking my phone 100x/day hoping to get a text from anyone. On the flip side, I was writing a lot of great music at the time during this darkness.

                Life is not about puzzling towards greatness as much as painting towards it. It’s not about getting the perfect shape today to fit my perfect future (Bob Dylan copycat) masterpiece. It’s more flexible than that, with some days being full of nice golden strokes that make sense to everybody, and other days being one abstract huck of grey. Our lives are more unique than copycat puzzles; they’re beautiful paintings, and as soon as embrace them as such, we can lay our burden of expectations down.