Every day is a wild work of art
Meditations on how treating life like a blank canvas can help us to live more beautifully.
Hi friend,
Over the past week, I’ve struggled to allow the river of creativity to move through me. I’ve sat down at coffee shop tables around London — some wooden, some marble, some unstable and rickety, all with a steaming cappuccino on the surface — willing for the words to come. I’ve tried sitting in meditation, taking walks on the Thames and crunching my way through the brush of Putney Heath, all of which have been previous avenues towards moments of creative insight.
And while vague ideas have fluttered in and out of my mind, the more succinct details weren’t coming through, as if they were locked behind a dam that had built up between my gut and my throat. This past week has required me to sift through big life questions as I consider how I want to structure the next chapter of my life, and this budding “life project,” as a friend of mine calls it, has taken up the majority of my headspace.
Thus, a few days ago, I found myself up at four in the morning, my mind a racetrack of one million different things — including, of course, what I was going to create this week.
I pulled myself onto my yoga mat and lit a few candles, the orange glow from the flame illuminating my new Starseed deck, a beautifully designed set of oracle cards from Rebecca Campbell. Holding the cards to my heartspace, I asked how I should be moving through this transition and picked a card from a random place in the deck.
“Your life is a canvas,” the card said, light dancing across its surface. “Artist. Manifestation. Creative accountability.”
“You are the artist of your life,” the page in the guidebook read. “This card is inviting you to see your entire life as a canvas, and the picture is completely up to you. Color it with your thoughts and feelings. Create the life that you most long to live.”
I went back to bed feeling like I’d unlocked a secret door in the corner of my mind, realizing that in trying so hard to be creative within my craft — I’d forgotten that simply to live is to be creative. That it is the choices we make as we move through our days that conspire to create a work of art, simply by way of our being. We are all creators, gifted with the chance to make beauty with our choices every time we have the privilege of waking up.
That day, I moved through my routine differently. Rather than hurriedly pouring and drinking my coffee without observation, I treated it as if it were a precious creation. Would I have it iced or hot? What shade of caramel would I concoct with the amount of milk added? As I began my way to work, I brought creative awareness to every decision: would I take the train, or walk the longer route by the river so that I could watch white gulls scoop low over the water, observe the way the pebbles shift under the weight of the fishermen? Moving through my workday, I noticed how I was holding my body — rather than crunching over my laptop, stomach clenched in tight furies, how could I create poetry with my posture? Could I roll my shoulders up and back, lift my gaze, expose my heart in the open air?
These choices — we make them without noticing, without breathing awareness into the fact that, really, every day is a work of art made up of selections. That we are all little specks of the Divine, working to create the most beautiful version of reality possible, and that we do that through everyday decisions.
Because if there was ever something that we had in common – a thread that runs through us all – it is our shared capacity for, and responsibility to, creation. But I hear too many people say “I’m not creative,” or look at me blankly when I ask them what creative pursuits are calling them. It’s part of our conditioning, a misguided belief that some souls are creative, and some are not. We’ve even thought up jobs and professions for the “creative people” — in the advertising world, for example, we refer to the designers as “the creatives,” as though everyone else is a non-creative, gray cogs in a machine whose purpose is to rotate in an endless uniform cycle.
For all too often, we think of being “creative” as demonstrating a tangible output. Something physical to be absorbed; something we can look at and say, I did that. Things like the exhibitions we pay to go see in museums, the pages of well-worn books between our fingers, the flower bouquets that illuminate shop front windows outside of metro stations.
But the card hadn’t told me to go pick up a physical canvas, or to find an empty vase. It had said, “Your life is the canvas.” Our lives are the canvas.
Because when we think of our lives as art instead of things to be strategically planned and positioned, when we move through our days with invisible paint brushes and pencils rather than hardened fists — we start creating a technicolor painting composed of our choices. We begin to add more depth and variety to the collective human experience. And we’ll all start to live a little more beautifully.
And yes, this includes making great big strokes — splashing bold colors across the canvas by making the big life decisions: by telling the person we love them, by following our intuition across the world to the country that’s calling to us, by opening the business that’s aligned to our gifts. But it’s also the little details — the faint, inscrutable lines made by tiny bristled brushes as we move through our days: going into the boutique candle store just to smell exotic scents, being intentional about the exact curvature of your smile as you thank the waiter during lunch. Steering the content of your conversations with friends away from gossip and into meaning. Choosing the shoes or the skirt or the sweater that makes you feel a little bit daring. Listening to music that colors the insides of your ears with something new as you make your way home from work.
So treat each one of your days like a wild work of art. Every decision is a decision of design. Each morning, get out of bed with an invisible paint brush in hand. Color your days by vowing to see every choice as one of creativity. And every evening, stand back to admire how you’ve created another patch of brilliance in the work-in-progress that is your life. We are all artists, moving through our days with creativity rushing through us. All we need to do is realize we’re already holding the paint brushes and the pencils. All we need to do is realize we are already standing in front of the canvas.
How will you move through today with creativity?
I’d love to know. Share this post on social with an example of how you’ve lived a little more beautifully today. You might just inspire someone else to become the artist of their own life.
In gratitude,
Cecilia
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Our Common Threads is written and edited by Cecilia Callas.