I just finished taking my second drawing class of the year.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve always wanted to be able to draw, but back when I was a kid I was told I was no good at it, and somehow I took that to heart. After all, I had lousy handwriting (still do) and poor fine motor skills. And the myth that you had to have \u201ctalent\u201d to do all kinds of things was overpowering back then.<\/p>\n
Maybe it\u2019s still overpowering.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I\u2019ve now taken two drawing classes, picked up some technical skills, and lost my fear.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not doing this for any particular purpose. I just want to draw. It seems to me that understanding the basics of drawing \u2013 the tools, the techniques, the ways of seeing \u2013 is very useful regardless of whether you want to be serious about making art.<\/p>\n
The underlying context I picked up as a kid was that if you aren\u2019t naturally good enough something, you shouldn\u2019t waste time on it. Only do things you\u2019re good at.<\/p>\n
And of course, if you did have enough talent to be seen as good at something creative, you were told you shouldn\u2019t do it because it wasn\u2019t \u201cpractical.\u201d How are you going to make a living with that, everyone said.<\/p>\n
Our drawing teacher told us this week that he quit his career in architecture to make art full time and is so much happier. Practicality isn\u2019t everything.<\/p>\n
He also told us he really enjoyed teaching us and he was very good at being encouraging about our efforts while still showing us what we missed.<\/p>\n
I think part of the reason he liked teaching us was because we were a bunch of grownups taking a class for its own sake and invested enough to do the work. Because the work is the whole point here.<\/p>\n
That was one of things I always liked about teaching Aikido: people were serious and were there to learn. People trained because they wanted to train, not with any larger goal in mind.<\/p>\n
I trained for those reasons. And, by the way, I was not \u201cnaturally good\u201d at Aikido. I just loved it \u2013 and karate before it \u2013 too much to be discouraged.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
There is a saying that no one on their deathbed ever says they regret not spending more time at the office. Classically, they regret not spending more time with their families.<\/p>\n
Now I\u2019m inclined to think we do a lot of mushy thinking about families in this culture, so I\u2019ve always rather dismissed that.<\/p>\n
But I do think that what people most regret is not having spent enough time on the work that matters to them. Or maybe the play that matters to them.<\/p>\n
Now I have become a writer, and writing is something that matters to me, matters on a deep level. It\u2019s not just the stories or the essays or the poems, but the use of words, not just to make good sentences or images that pop off the page, but to discover.<\/p>\n
Because when you try to put something in words, you have to figure out what you really mean. And that opens up something else.<\/p>\n
I know you do the same thing when you train in Aikido or other martial arts. I\u2019m beginning to see how that works with drawing. Maybe if I\u2019d kept singing and playing music longer and been more disciplined about practicing, I\u2019d have a deeper understanding of how it works with sound.<\/p>\n
If I have regrets about choices I made over the years, they are about not learning to draw until recently, not playing more music, not taking up martial arts when I was younger, not getting serious about fiction earlier.<\/p>\n
Those things are not related to money. They are not even related to success or fame or stardom. I\u2019ve invested enough in my writing to want to be read and respected for it, but that\u2019s about as far as my ambition goes these days.<\/p>\n
Except for martial arts, the things I\u2019m drawn to are mostly creative practices. But at the core, what really gets me \u2013 and what ties Aikido to the rest \u2013 is doing things that open up another level the more you work at them.<\/p>\n
The world is full of things like that. I imagine that\u2019s what draws a lot of people to science and to academic pursuits. It\u2019s the essence of philosophy. It underlies invention.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not just doing something well enough to get by; it\u2019s finding a level of deep truth and then discovering a few years later that there\u2019s even more to it than you thought.<\/p>\n
If I have any real regrets, it\u2019s that I didn\u2019t understand this earlier. Obviously I figured some of it out on the unconscious level because I spent so much time in Aikido and finally got serious about writing. Those things always mattered more than any job I had.<\/p>\n
But if I\u2019d known all this at, say, sixteen, I\u2019d have done a better job of figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up.<\/p>\n
Better late than never, I suppose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I just finished taking my second drawing class of the year. I\u2019ve always wanted to be able to draw, but back when I was a kid I was told I was no good at it, and somehow I took that to heart. After all, I had lousy handwriting (still do) and poor fine motor skills. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[626,20,18],"tags":[72,876,845],"class_list":["post-3432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-process","category-writing","tag-aikido","tag-creativity","tag-learning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3432"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3433,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3432\/revisions\/3433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}