This is about the stuff more difficult to bring to our art.

In the fifth Star trek movie The Final Frontier,* James T Kirk refuses the offer from the Vulcan Sybok to have his pain taken away, declaring how it to his pain which makes him Human.

Scott Doorley and Scott Witthoft offer an illuminating thought on this from an unusual source – that of shaping creative spaces – stating how we ought to:

‘Treat storage as a living entity that occupies at least
30 percent of your space.  You’ll need at least that much.’

Value the things you store from your past, is my gain from this.

Which bring up the question for each of us: how do we deal with the pain of memory and the memory of pain?  Either the prideful and greedy and foolish things we have been done, or, those done to us?

If we have a merciful and graceful place to store these, meaning we are prepared not to hide from, or bury the painful things, they become powerful resources for our art, which if lost leave us impoverished and inhibited.

What if they can help us to our key practices for art of humility, gratitude, and faithfulness, our ways for exploring a creative, generous, and enjoyable life.**

I’ve mentioned Daniel Kahneman‘s belief that we substitute an easy question for a difficult one whenever we can; he goes on to cite his law of least effort, which ‘asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action.’

Here is our enemy, though it promises to take away the pain of memory and the memory of pain, but better still to the use the pain redemptively to produce our art.  I stretch another thought I came upon which I see as covering the pain of our past and helps us to be young again:

‘YOUTH is not a number, it’s an attitude.  So many disruptive
artists have been youngsters, even the old ones.  Arts isn’t
genetic or chronological destiny, it’s a choice, open to anyone
willing to exchange pain for magic.’

We can be courageous in spite of …; we can be generous in spite of …; and, we can live wisely in spite of … .

(*You’ve probably figured out my taste in movies by now.)
(**I share about this in more detail in other blogs – I’ll aim to find these and add a link.)