Accept for a moment that everything in life is a form of art, Can you see it? Drafting contracts, planning a romantic encounter, making spreadsheets, cooking a meal, talking to people, managing projects, building a birdhouse, it’s all a form of art, yes even financial statements and I’ve seen some sublime ones in my day.
If everything is a form of art, that can only mean one thing, we must all be artists to some degree or another. We all apply our skills and talents to various degrees of success but essentially we create physical and emotional art every day. Take this quote by Reed Abbit Moore for example:
Writing is like painting with words, the paper is the canvas, the pen is the brush, the words are the colours and the verbs, nouns and adjectives are the blending of the hues that add depth to the picture you are creating.
-Reed Abbitt Moore-
Every one you meet, work with, argue with, make love to or hang out with are all artists in their own right. We all have a colour pallet ingrained within us which we use to paint our worlds. The colours are a culmination of our experiences and interactions which in turn allows us to give form to our perspective, insight into our lives, establishes our driving language and most importantly exposes our talents, history and interests.
Colours grow through us as much as they grow through others. Your colour pallet is unique to you and is heavily influenced by your state of mind. Your colour pallet is not always the same, its situational and continuously changing, it is influenced and shaped by those people, events and pieces of information that we let into our lives. In all honesty sometimes things and people force their ways into our lives and the effects can be horrendous, but let’s focus on the positive for the moment.
Far too often people are told what colours to have and use, what is considered art and what isn’t, how to paint and how not to. Unlike the actual “art world” where something that looks like it was painted by an autistic raccoon with a speech impediment can be passed of as masterpieces, human art is complex in nature and true in its core. Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s not art to someone else, and far too often we underestimate the impact we have on someone’s mind with how we act, react, engage and critique their efforts and abilities. Learn to appreciate the artist and soon you will learn to appreciate their art. And it’s ok not to like someone’s art they just taught you about yourself, they expanded your colour pallet.
In most situations you are only ever in two specific roles, you are either a teacher, or a student, yes some people will argue for the role of a leader, a mother, a coach, a friend, a lover etc etc etc but none of those matter. Fundamentally, regardless of what you think, or you role definition says you are, you are always either learning from someone or something or you are given the opportunity to teach. In other words you are always in a position to add, expand or remove from your and other’s colour pallets. Unless you are dead, I guess you get to bench this idea, but even in death you will probably influence someone. The cycle never ends, teaching is a form of immorality if you wanted to get deeply philosophical on the idea.
The most important role you will ever have is the role of a teacher and it doesn’t matter what you do, everything you do has an opportunity to teach. The privilege of shaping a mind is firstly a massive responsibility and unfortunately many times underestimated, not considered fully or realised completely when interacting with someone or doing something. The act of teaching, in effect adding colours to someone’s colour pallet, allows the opportunity to expanding and influence someone’s skills, confidence and experience and it is beyond measure. The risk of damaging someone is inherently very real but not impossible to to avoid.
The most valuable and vulnerable position you will ever find yourself in is the role of a student. The opportunity to learn and expand on your skills and experience, the colour pallet your posses, is boundless when you apply yourself and take the risk of making yourself vulnerable to critique. Observation and critique are powerful learning mechanisms beyond just the listening and questioning process. What you learn and experience is what shapes you, this is what allows you to grow and eventually if you are brave enough teach others. Learning is an evolving process that continuously places you in a position of assimilation and analysis and it is through the practice of disassociation that the best value is gained, separate yourself form the content, event or person and you will be able to observe and understand the critique better.
And here is where the human responsibility lies, People in general are not aware of how large an impact they can make, I have far too often seen people strip out entire sections of their colour pallet because someone they trusted or held in high regards criticised them to the point of loosing confidence, take note of this, it is the first time that I used the word criticise as in criticism, go lookup the difference between Criticism and Critique and it will change your life . Don’t get me wrong if an activity or though pattern is deprecating it’s deprecating, if it’s negative, its negative if it’s illegal its probably fun…I mean wrong. Sometimes brutal honesty is required to shape and remove or reshape colours from a pallet and someone has to be that person, it will be you at some point will you remember that you have an opportunity to improve?
You can be brutally honest without being brutal. Yes you read that right the art of explaining opportunity to improve is not that hard and it does not need to be punitive. I choose to communicate with the mind set of “opportunity to improve”, this already takes the bite out of the conversation, after making this mind shift it’s a simple matter of not making it personal. The combination of language choice and mind shift is nothing more than the choice of colours with which I choose to paint the conversation. This is a powerful combination to teach with and it is a teachable skill, it’s not just a talent, some are more adept at it form the start, other are not but everyone can learn and develop this skill.
Not everything that happens, happens to you or because of you. This concept is hard to understand but once grasped unlocks unlimited learning potential. It’s easy to simply ignore and opportunity to learn by personalising the event and reacting emotionally to it, the skill to distinguish between yourself and the event, you will not always be taught by someone who is acutely aware of their responsibility. For example distinguishing between someone’s lack of ability to effectively communicate with you and the content they are trying to communicate. Many times people communicate with raw emotion and this makes an event extremely personal as such is quite a different skill all together where the student makes an active choice to learn regardless of circumstances. Again I’m no fool no one learns during a horrible accident or a horrific assault, you can learn afterwards and this is admirable beyond comparison but rather difficult in the moment. Information is gathered in the moment, learning takes places afterwards, give it time.
To teach is to learn to learn is to teach. Sounds like a nice circle of nonsense but think for a moment, you learn so that you can grow, and if you grow enough you may be able to teach others. Humans have been doing this for millennia, we have unfortunately forgotten the roots of our knowledge transfer. We no longer strip the flesh of a mammoth with our teeth while the village elder tells tales of long past wisdom, but we can slurp a cappuccino while streaming a video, reading and article or just shutting up long enough to have an actual conversation and in and amongst all this there are teachable moments and opportunities to learn.
I hope this article has at least made you aware of your colour pallet, and perhaps aware of your responsibility to your fellow humans. Not everyone can learn from you, sometimes you are just not the right teacher for what they need. Admitting that not everyone is teachable does not take away from the fact that everyone has something to teach even if they are just teaching how not to do something.
Mind, on the rocks?! 