
Where is your bliss station? […] You have to try to find it.*
(Joseph Campbell)
How much will it cost?
If we’re talking technology, the cost will go down over time. Kevin Kelly notes, although the price will never become zero, how:
In the goodness of time any particular technological function will act as if it were free.**
If we’re talking about your art then the cost will go up over time.
It’s why we find ourselves using words like sacrifice.
Artist and writer Austin Kleon quotes Joseph Campbell having created his own bliss station or sacred space, a place to disconnect from the outer world and all its demands and for a little while to connect to the inner world of becoming and possibilities.
Some will connect to their god, others to their muse, still others to the universe and some to all three and more.
You may think, then, that because you don’t consider yourself a writer or an artist, you don’t need to worry about a bliss station.
Joseph Campbell’s words, though, are aimed at everyone, his gift to open our eyes and hearts to the specialness of every human life and how we each have something to bring, something artistic.
The cost is more about time than money. It’s why time is the most precious thing we have.
Tomorrow I turn sixty years of age and yet I believe that with this kind of investment some of the most exciting possibilities are ahead.
(*Joseph Campbell, from Austin Kleon’s Keep Going.)
(**From Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable.)