All Art is About the Human Experience

You know how a lot of interviews or podcasts include the question, “if you could tell people just one thing about (blank), what would it be?” Well, if I could tell people one thing about the arts, it would be this: all art is about the human experience, and that’s why it’s so important, useful, and valuable to everyone.

A lot of people think of beauty when they think of the arts, and they aren’t wrong. Part of what the arts offer us is certainly incredible beauty. Beauty so perfect it’s remarkable human hands and minds made it, or are even making it before our eyes. But seasoned arts-lovers know that a lot of art isn’t just beautiful (or isn’t even beautiful at all). But what art always is is an expression of what it means to be human, made by humans.

This is such a critical first thing to understand about art that I think a lot of us on the “inside” kind of forget to tell people to start here. You see, once you get into any sort of formal education about any of the arts, you learn about different philosophies around art, and some of these say that art is made for art’s sake, and some say that art is made for the sake of storytelling or communication. These theories and doctrines go back to the time of the ancient Greeks, so they’re… pretty rock solid. But, this kind of theoretical thinking doesn’t help us arts folk talk to people just starting on their arts journey. What does help is reminding new listeners, observers, and audience members that every great work of art was made by a person who had something to say, and the thing they had to say came from their own human experience.

So why is this important? Because, if you’re just getting started with the fine arts, or you’re arts-curious, or you’re just looking for more insight and inspiration and meaning in your own life and that’s led you to the arts, you probably don’t just want to listen to a piece of classical music for a beautiful little brain-wander. You probably want to have the fullest, most interesting, most emotionally-connected experience possible – and you don’t even know how deep and incredible that experience can be yet, because you’ve never done it. An artist or long-time arts-lover, on the other hand, gets that the greatest works of art have huge backstories or subtexts, often rooted in the creator’s own life, that bring a huge layer of meaning to the work, without which we often just have – wait for it – beauty.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with beauty for beauty’s sake, or art for art’s sake – and it 100% exists. In fact, lots of artists (from composers to painters to choreographers) were all about making “pure” art that is meant to stand apart from their personal backstories or beliefs, and meant to be interpreted without reaching for stories hidden within the work. But (and perhaps you see where I’m going with this), even that says something so amazing about being human. The need for pure creation says something about the person who made the thing. It speaks to something in all of us. And even “pure” art is a medium through which we can interpret our own stories and experiences.

“The greatest works of art have epic backstories or subtexts, often rooted in the creator’s own life, that bring a huge layer of meaning to the work, without which we often just have – wait for it – beauty. ”

This is Why it’s Worth Your Time to Learn About the Arts

And that brings me to my main point. The reason I want people to understand that, in the beautiful paintings we look at or the ballets we watch or the symphonies we listen to, there are incredible stories and myths and fables and lessons about being human, is because that’s what makes art worth learning to take in. If you’re like, “I don’t get the appeal of classical music,” and your musician friend is freaking out about how passionate they are about a particular symphony, it’s not just because of the badass brass chorale in the last movement – it’s because that moment rouses something inside of them, and that something is the end of the journey the composer has taken them on over the course of the piece that is probably about human striving, or sacrifice, or overcoming challenges, and that’s the triumphant moment of success. If you like looking at paintings but you don’t really understand why people are so obsessed with, say, Van Gogh, it’s because you aren’t looking to understand the complicated man in his painting of a little room he lived in – why he paints everyday objects there with such care, why the walls seem to open up beyond the canvas, why the room seems to move around you when you stare at it.

Feeling and thinking about and learning about the stories of being human that are hidden (or not so hidden) within the great works of art is something artists sometimes poo-poo as low-brow – but it’s the very foundation of what makes art great. It’s what makes artists fall in love with art in the first place, so it’s where you (as an art-loving newbie) should also start. Why? Because it’s not just a chance to understand the painting or piece of music or play better, but because it’s a chance to know yourself better.

When you watch a great work of modern dance with the understanding that the choreographer intended to convey his own experience as a black man in America, the work will speak to you. It will jump off the stage and grab you by the shoulders and either confront or embrace you. It will make you feel seen, or make you realize you’ve got a lot more seeing to do.

If you watch an opera about a person who is dying and who tries to spare their lover the pain of watching them fade away by instead breaking their heart first, you might see your own tendencies to push people away, or to reject your own vulnerability.

When you look at a (yes, beautiful) painting of the sea in the earliest hours of the morning, and it strikes you as hopeful and even daring, with the sun just emerging over the water and the birds circling and the waves brightly and enthusiastically crashing against the rocks, you might think about a journey you’re currently embarking upon, that you feel courageous about, and you might know you have what it takes to weather it.

When artists make art, even “pure” art, they make it from a miraculous place of body, mind, and spirit that aligns critical thinking and exceptional technical skill with the subconscious, the emotional, and even the divine. When we, as observers, listeners, and audience members, take that work in, we can go to that place the work was created from. We can raise our thinking and feeling to that level, and welcome incredible insight. And sometimes, yes, we might even just be struck by how incredibly beautiful something is, and surely there is plenty of room in the human experience for that as well. But – once in a while, we might see ourselves reflected back at us, from a moment of inspired creation.

And THAT is the one thing I want people to know about the fine arts.

Three Reasons the Arts are the Surprising Solution to Adulthood Malaise

Last week, I wrote about the phenomenon of simultaneous overwhelm/underwhelm, which was something I had experienced myself, and which I was increasingly noticing in my fellow 30-somethings. If you missed it, of course I would encourage you to check out the full post here, but in case you just need a refresher, here’s the gist: being in and around your 30s in today’s hyper-stimulating, hyper-stressful world seems to be bringing on the dual pain of feeling totally overwhelmed (by personal and professional obligations and goals, plus everything happening in the world around us) as well as feeling totally underwhelmed (that sense of daily monotony which usually leads to feelings of “is this all there is?”). 

Of course, I suggested an artsy solution to both problems, which I acknowledged might make my stressed-out peers want to punch me in the face. But the fine arts really are one of the most profound toolkits we have as human beings, and it’s time for our generation to reclaim them, rediscover how they can serve us, and fall back in love with everything they have to offer us.

So today, I want to talk about the three reasons why reconnecting to the fine arts is a huge and transformative way we can all start moving out of this stressful stuckness we’re all feeling. 

The Fine Arts are a Roadmap to Being Human

Part of what is so hard about being in and around your 30s is that you hit a lot of huge life milestones in a short amount of time, and they’re mostly not the fun, carefree milestones of your teens and twenties. I’m talking about marriages starting and marriages ending. I’m talking about having children or wanting to have children or not being able to have children. I’m talking about losing parents and friends and relatives you’re close to. This is why I laugh when I see people in their early 20s talk about “adulting” – girl, you don’t know what it means to “be an adult” just because you did your laundry.

When we get into what I call “real adulthood” – the time after college and after those first few years of entry-level jobs and a lot of career confusion and dating and moving and friendships – shit tends to start hitting the fan in our personal lives just as we’re trying to establish our careers, and both zones of instability leave a lot of us feeling awfully lost. We feel lost in our work because we’re trying to get ahead or build something important, which requires a whole different level of boss-ness than the risks we took in our 20s required. As we’re given more responsibilities, we come to realize that we don’t know what we’re doing a lot of the time, AND our work now has actual, serious consequences and impacts. Plus, now we have to make way more difficult decisions that affect not only our futures, but the people around us. Add to this the fact that, if you’re going to leave a profession, it’s probably going to be around now, when you realize it’s just not for you. Holy work stress, y’all.

Then we come home or read an urgent mid-meeting text, and we’re catapulted into a whole other pile of challenges. As I alluded to, we often feel lost or unsure in our personal lives around this time. Perhaps we’ve become caregivers (to children, parents, or other loved ones) for the first time, or in a different capacity. Maybe we’re experiencing deep loss that we haven’t had to go through before. Or maybe we’re facing stresses related to what we expected our lives to look like by now and what they’re actually shaping up to be. 

The thing that is miraculous about this phase of life (like all phases) is that, no matter how alone you might feel when these things are happening to you or when you’re trying to figure out something really difficult, you are not the first human being to go through this. Not even close. Realizing that you’re actually not that special sounds devastating, but it’s actually profoundly soothing, because you know other people have gotten through this or figured this really thorny problem out, so damn it!, you can too.

That’s where the arts come in. All art is some form of storytelling about being human. Some of it is literal and direct, like a lot of theatre. There are so many incredible works of drama, comedy, and tragedy about all the subjects and themes I’ve just touched on, and seeing a character work through the same problem you’re trying to figure out, or live through the same hardship you're living through, can be so incredibly profound. Just feeling seen can be a soothing balm in a stressful season.

The more abstract arts, like classical music, visual art, dance, and even contemporary theatre, are also filled with stories and lessons about the human experience. This is what a lot of people don’t realize about the arts: a person made each piece of expressive work we look at or listen to because they had something to say about life or death or beauty or struggle or fun or love… usually not just because they felt like making something (although pure creation can also be a beautiful expression of what it means to be human). So when you hear a piece of classical music that a composer wrote after the death of a loved one and you are also going through some kind of profound loss, that can be so powerful. Or when you see a piece of contemporary dance about the struggles and triumphs of women when you feel like you can’t budge that frickin’ glass ceiling in your industry – well damn, you’re going to see yourself in that work of art.

But it’s not just about seeing your struggle or challenge or questions mirrored back to you: it’s about the opportunity to feel your way through what you’re dealing with via the medium of art. So if an artist was feeling stifled by the regimes under which she was working, and that’s incredibly apparent in her paintings, you’re also going to see her ideas and feelings and rebellion against that system – and THAT is where the magic is. Art is not just an expression; it’s a roadmap for being human. And for the big problems we all face around this age, particularly in our current cultural and political climate, we could sure as shit use a roadmap.

The Arts Provide the Type and Level of Stimulation We’re Lacking

I touched on this last week, but it is so incredibly critical. A lot of stress we’re experiencing in today’s age that previous generations didn’t experience is brought on by technology. We all know this. But the internet is, of course, an amazing tool, and we can’t abandon it. This is why we need to be far more mindful and intentional about the type and level of stimulation we welcome into our hours and days: we need to balance the time we spend in hyper-stimulation mode.

What we’re often lacking when we spend time watching TV and particularly when we spend time on the internet/social media is deep stimulation. Apps in particular are designed to light up the shallow, quick-reward areas of our brain to keep us logged in as long as possible. We see this in likes, in perpetual scroll, and in the 24-hour news cycle full of clickbait headlines. It’s like being on a candy diet all day every day. Sure you get your calories, but there’s no nourishment there.

Think, instead, of the type of attention it takes to thoughtfully go through an art museum or gallery. Or to listen to an hour-long symphony. Do you feel almost overwhelmed when you think about something like that? This is similar to how many people today feel a sense of panic about trying to meditate, or experience extreme emotional discomfort at the idea of being without their phone. We are so starved for quiet, drawn-out, slow experiences that, for the first time in history, we’ve actually started recoiling against them.

But just as meditation can be rewarding in a way few other activities can match, so too do the fine arts bring a type and level of stimulation we desperately need but which is hard to find from other mediums. Losing yourself in one piece of art and slowly feeling and thinking your way through it taps into that much deeper part of our brains that we don’t spend much time tending to these days. It’s the same part that we access when we reach a flow state in our work or even in mundane home tasks – that feeling of time being suspended and everything being ripe and juicy and natural and rewarding. I always think about a woodworker when I think of this state, how he moves assuredly but with curiosity and a rich earthiness that brings forth things that didn’t exist moments before. That’s the state we’re looking for when we experience art, and it’s a state we’re all starving for, whether we know it or not.

See if you can conjure that feeling in your own mind and body of being in flow. Perhaps you find it when you garden. Perhaps, like me, you find it when you write (I even used to find it when drafting legal documents – hey, to each their own). Or perhaps you find it when you really mindfully play with your crawling baby or run outside with your kid. It’s the “slow breath, so alive, can’t believe how good and deep and richly rewarding your life is” feeling. 

When we allow ourselves to really listen to a piece of music or really look at a piece of art, we find that feeling, and we also allow our deep brain to take in the intentions of the person who made it. By slowing down and welcoming this other level of stimulation, we also welcome in the profound in a great work of art, even the divine. Just as many people don’t “get” meditation until they get past the hurdle of actually quieting their mind and letting go of the buzzy level they usually operate at, so too do people often move from “not getting art” to oh, REALLY getting it when they find this place in themselves. 

Sounds like an amazing salve to how effing overwhelming and also unrewarding a lot of your life feels right now? Oh don’t I know it.

Many of the Skills and Tools We’re Seeking are the Daily Bread of Artists

The third reason art is the surprising solution to a lot of our early-real-adulthood problems is that a lot of the things we need to learn at this stage are actually really commonplace for artists. 

This is a huge “upleveling” time of life – we’re all trying to both literally move up in the world through our careers, as well as move forward in big ways in our personal lives. To do so, we need to “uplevel”, which means taking our skills and mindsets and abilities to a level we don’t yet have mastered. 

Cue learning about the lives and work and practices of both the greatest artists who ever lived, as well as your average working artists today. What I’ve found, through many, many conversations with my peers, is that so many people are craving a maker’s mindset – a craftsperson’s life. They want the feeling that their work is moving them forward. They feel they’re missing rewarding routines, because the routines they’re in are imposed by the needs and schedules of other people. They don’t know how to conquer self-doubt, or take criticism, or discover their authentic voice. 

In short, they don’t know how to live and think like an artist.

Artists know these things by necessity, and have for countless generations. A ballerina knows discipline and routine, because without it, she cannot achieve anything. A visual artist knows how to have a mindset of constant improvement, because without it, he can’t continue to produce works after either a huge success or a huge failure. A classical musician absolutely must master the art of taking, filtering, and integrating feedback, because she does it on a daily basis, and she needs the ears and input of others in order to make her work better. It isn’t that artists are magic or better than non-artists – it’s just that the skills and tools they absolutely need to survive happen to be the exact ones many non-artists are searching for in their own lives right now. 

Feeling art-curious?

Those are just three reasons why the arts are such a surprising, transformative, healing toolkit for moving out of the malaise of being in and around this early-real-adulthood phase of life. Not only do the arts soothe the overwhelmy/underwhelmy feelings I wrote about last week, they also offer us a map out of them. They show us we’re not alone and reward us for spending time pondering and enjoying them. They give us actual tools we can use to take our lives to the next level we’re trying to reach. 

If you’re intrigued, I really hope you’ll start on your own artful journey today. All you have to do is kick it around here, and I’ll give you all the tools you need to reconnect to the arts and reclaim a birthright human beings have benefited from for generations upon generations. It’s time for our generation to step into that world again and reclaim it for ourselves.

Fighting the Feeling of Simultaneous Overwhelm/ Underwhelm

As I write this, there is an ominous energy brewing outside my office windows.

I live on Canada’s Vancouver Island, which is west of Vancouver and north of Seattle, so you can probably envision what our winter is like: lots of rain (though far less than either of those neighbour cities) and very little snow (if any). What you might not know is that, like most islands in and around the Pacific, we get the occasional, super-intense wind storm. Well, it’s midday, and after a forebodingly calm morning, a motley crew of different dark clouds are being pushed in by the invisible hand in the sky, and the trees in the neighbourhood are beginning to flail without rhythm or pattern. Loud whooshes come out of nowhere, the occasional garbage can falls over in the distance, and I can hear the two metal patio chairs on our front step begin their awkward dance back and forth between the railings.

In short: batten down the hatches, because here she comes.

The feeling of unease that underlies a coming storm is the perfect background for talking about a malaise I’ve picked up on lately, particularly amongst my fellow early-30-somethings who are settling into their careers and family lives. And, of course, I’ve witnessed it most acutely in myself: the simultaneous feeling of being overwhelmed and totally underwhelmed.

So first let’s talk about overwhelm – a subject we all know too well, I think. The feeling of the never-going-to-be-done To Do List. The feeling of so many emails you’ll literally never get through them all. The desire to keep up with current events, but the front page of the paper alone is so full of absolutely terrible news that you can’t process everything so you process none of it. Having too many commitments and not enough time. Having so many as-of-yet unaccomplished goals that you’re pretty sure you’re going to hit forty having accomplished none of them. Perfect kids’ birthday parties and money stresses and aging parents and student loans. And the planet is literally on fire and we seem to be on the brink of another major war. Not to mention that we’re drowning in stuff, we’re dealing with chronic illness, and half the world tells us to only eat plants and the other tells us to only eat meat.

Overwhelm.

Now, if you aren’t hyperventilating like I was when I wrote that, let’s talk about a far more insidious foe: underwhelm. The feeling that every day is pretty much the same. That you sit in your cubicle or your kid’s nursery or behind your shop counter every day, and each day blends into the next. That you watch six hours of Netflix in a row and you enjoy it but you’re also not sure why you did it. Where you dress a lot like the people around you and on TV because, hey, it’s easy and safe, and you’ll just keep getting the same haircut because… whatever. Where you’re pretty sure you used to have hobbies and interests, and now you kind of golf once a year, but that’s good enough. Where your life is fine and you have nothing to complain about and people are dying in other countries and you’re not homeless so what have you got to grump around about? Where you’re not depressed but you’re just feeling blah about everything but oh well, I guess that’s what people mean by “adulting.”

That’s underwhelm.

I have 100% felt so simultaneously overwhelmed and underwhelmed that I wasn’t sure what to do or how to move through it.

I was working at a corporate job, trying to have a baby, trying to figure out how to make enough money to buy a bigger house for said baby in our super expensive city, stressing about how stressed I was because my doctor said my cortisol was probably too high to have a baby, wondering why exactly I went to law school, and hating nothing more than making the same cup of coffee in the breakroom every morning at 7am before reading the same emails and facing the same stresses each and every day.

This is also where I’ll remind you that I didn’t start out as a lawyer/MBA corporate type – I started out as an opera singer. Being a singer until well into my 20s was an entirely different kind of stressful. In fact, in many ways, it was cripplingly stressful in a way most jobs just aren’t, because being an artist means equating your self-worth with your artistry, and hoo boy that can be a hard row to hoe. But, one thing I will say for being an artist is this: it is very rarely underwhelming. And even when you have all those societal and family and cultural forces of overwhelm pushing in on you, you can turn to your art. You can rely on it. You can seek solace in it and use it to process what’s happening to you and dig into it in new and profound ways. Practicing or painting or rehearsing is one hell of a balm for overwhelm, let me tell you.

So what’s a non-artist to do? Say you have a lot of those same overwhelm/underwhelm daily feelings I had while I was living my corporate life, but you actually love being an accountant or a teacher or a lawyer or whatever it is you do for a living, and you have no interest in blowing up your life like I did and becoming some kind of crazy entrepreneur-writer-freelancer. How do you battle underwhelm and overwhelm the same way artists do?

You do it exactly the same way they do: by inviting art into your life. I know this sounds so trite if you’re grinding it out at a consulting firm or trying to get tenure as a starting professor or getting a handful of hours of sleep a week while your baby is teething. I know I know I KNOW that me telling you “hey, you know what would help? Listening to classical music!” makes you want to punch me in my artsy face. But just stay with me to the end of this post and see if you want to give it a try. Because if you’re buried in the simultaneous overwhelm/underwhelm conundrum like I was, I bet you’re just desperate enough to try anything right now.

Why Does Art Help Soothe the Underwhelm/Overwhelm Feelings?

So, here’s the thing about Underwhelm/Overwhelm: they’re not feelings you can just think through (you can’t be like “oh my parents are aging and I feel overwhelmed about that, I’ll just make a 5-point plan and then it’ll be good”, nor can you solve the existential crisis of feeling that your life might not have meaning by just brainstorming your way out of it). Likewise, I think neither underwhelm nor overwhelm is purely emotional, since both involve feeling stuck, which often needs some level of action-oriented thinking to move out of. AND, if you want to get really deep (and I know you do!), both feelings have to do with who we are at a soul level – what our mission/purpose in life is, what the point of life is in the first place, and what we’re supposed to be here to learn or experience.

The thing about art (and not just visual art, but all of the fine arts – music, dance, and theatre included) is that art is one of the few things we have made as human beings and that we also get to experience as humans that exists on the plane that merges thinking, feeling, and the profound. Art is so incredible because it is stories and impressions and thoughts about being human, made by humans for other humans. But for centuries we’ve all also known that there is something magical or mystical in art that we can’t fully explain in words using rational thought.

Art is an incredible balm for overwhelm for a few reasons. First, a lot of overwhelm comes from overstimulation (both from our phones/the media/the internet, as well as from other people who all seem to want or need things from us). Retreating into a piece of music or a play or a single painting is an incredible respite from this time in our lives that is inherently very stimulating, and from a world that is positively off-the-rails hyperstimulating in ways that are highly unnatural. Second, we often feel overwhelmed because we don’t have enough time or space for processing what’s happening to us, and something as simple as sitting in a dark concert hall for two hours can be incredibly powerful for both our conscious and subconscious minds to work through whatever we’re dealing with. And third, overwhelm (at least for me) often comes from a feeling of no one understanding you, or of standing alone. Art is a roadmap of how to be a human, made by humans, for other humans. It is filled with every story of the human experience one can imagine, often told through metaphor and obfuscation, making it an amazing way to see your own story played back to you. It’s an incredible medium for knowing that you are not alone in what you’re going through.

As for underwhelm, it’s simpler: art is just the right kind of stimulation to reignite parts of your mind and heart that were just temporarily shut down while you figured out how to be an adult. Most people start out being (and believing themselves to be) really creative and curious. Even into college and the few years after, we’re figuring out who we are and experimenting and being adventurous and crying to love songs and watching weird movies and doodling in our notebooks. Then someone gives us a suit or a baby or a 401K and we’re like, “okay, I guess I’m an adult now.” Well, that kind of (totally unnecessary but culturally engrained) resignation is exactly what leads to underwhelm, and it’s exactly what’s cured by infusing your life with art. For countless generations, people have spent their lives learning about and enjoying and finding their passion in the fine arts. And I don’t mean as an artist – I mean as a fan, as an aficionado, as a patron. Let your curious creative self back out, because she’s suffocating! Go to a play. Start listening to jazz. Buy an actual piece of art that you love for your home. Hell, maybe even make something yourself. Tap back into seeing and hearing and watching in ways that light up your emotions. Build a richer, more beautiful life for yourself. As Lizzo says, “boss up and change your life, you can have it all no sacrifice.” I’m pretty sure she was talking about art.

So that’s my pitch on fighting the simultaneous Overwhelm/Underwhelm feeling that seems to accompany early (real) adulthood, especially in the totally effed-up world in which we’re all coming into our own. I know the arts are a huge, overwhelming mountain to approach if you’re new, but they’re actually so easy to get into. All you need is curiosity and openness to new experiences, and if you’re ready to get out of the Overwhelm/Underwhelm feedback loop, I bet you’re feeling pretty open to just about anything right now.

Here’s to a life with more reflection and less stress, more self-knowledge and less self-doubt, more creative ideas and less stuck-ness. Here’s to a more artful life.