Talking to an artist friend who was facing a blue mood period gave me the opportunity to think to how many common steps we share as artists and creatives in general.
We have a really hard time dealing with what society ask us as normal: getting into a 9-5 job, getting a life-long mortgage to buy a home, fighting with bills, living a whole life waiting for something better to come when we have earned a bigger amount of money, when kids are grown up, when home is paid and so on.
We are asked to accept a lifestyle based on long years struggling to build up a career in someone else’s business, to achieve power, to amass money, and we are infused by mass media a preconceived and imposed idea of richness based on thoughtless consumerism.
Our joy and happiness become like the carrot placed in front of the donkey to make it move forward, always there to be reached with the next step –after mortgage, when childen are grown-up, when retired - but never reached.
Most often people do not even question those imposed values, and have forgotten what are the real things that give them true happiness, but I will talk about this a next time here.
I personally love when things move and change and transform, while the majority of people seem to feel safer and happier when life repeats itself on the usual trails. They are just different attitudes towards life, both respectable. But I have always felt all this commonly accepted normality like a huge trap I had to save my life from, and already at a very young age I was terrified at the idea of finding myself old with the feeling that I had not lived my life.
A long time ago I took the decision that I would always do all that I would feel necessary to escape from the Big Trap, from what I felt did not come from my heart or my inner vision and needs and dreams, ready to pay the necessary prices. Prices to pay are always seen afterwards, cannot be foreseen, and sometimes they are hard. But on the other side of my scale there was always Freedom, sitting quietly, watching me and waiting for me there. Freedom is movement, change, transformation, creativity, happiness.
My friend asked me if I had ever had those days when you are tired of chasing your dreams. Even though I have had my blue days and periods, I have never felt I was in the wrong place, because I knew I was following my heart, my intuition, my soul. It has been a deep, inner path, and I will talk about it a next time here.
In the end, it is not the shoes you wear that is important, it is the footprints you leave. For each of us different, for each of us a different fragrance in the air, and a different legacy to give this world and this beautiful Earth.
