WHICH WAY ARE YOU GOING BILLY
MAY, 2014
I’ve been
spending a lot of time recently conducting a personal retrospective of my work.
Fortunately I have digital files of most of my artwork, as well as portfolios
filled with drawings and sketches from the past 50 plus years. The volume of
the work is impressive. Most of it is pretty good, some of it is very good, and
some of it is not so good to awful. I have enjoyed seeing its evolution and
have been sobered by the reminders of the failures. The experience has inspired
me to move forward, building on the good while learning from the bad.
To a lesser extent I’ve
been doing the same thing with my personal life. The Internet and social
mediums allow me to reach out to distant family, and old friends and
acquaintances, to rekindle old relationships, establish new ones, and to
nurture cherished memories.
The accumulation of
years tends to push us backwards, ever deeper into the past. Nostalgia can
easily become the default setting that drives our thinking. This is enhanced by
another characteristic tendency of age, the reluctance to move forward into new
and unfamiliar directions and the fear of re-defining ourselves. There is
comfort and security in staying close to what we know. Most of the “some days”
are behind us, and experience has blunted the unbridled enthusiasm of youth. This
is the mindset that has characterized the first several years of this decade
for me.
Fortunately it doesn’t
have to be this way, at least not totally. Now, at the mid point of the 8th
decade, I find that with a little effort and a lot of commitment it is possible
to find the proper balance between these opposing directions. Where we place
the fulcrum depends on individual preferences. Reaching into the past can allow
us to re-visit both the good and the bad, perhaps providing new insights on
what we once thought, or did.
There may be lessons to be learned that will provide some guidance for
what is still to come. Perhaps there will be an opportunity to complete
something left undone, or to re-kindle or redefine old relationships. However,
as helpful as “managing” the past may be, the real challenge is optimizing the
future. I am beginning to feel that this will become the major focus in the
years ahead.
The priority should
always be on the future, as long as we are allowed to have one.
I was militantly anti-nostagia in my callow youth. Now I bask in it regularly. You talk about a balance and that makes some sense. But what I really want to do deep in my artistic soul is to cast away formulas, comforts, pre-dispositions, habits and all the other cranky old fuddy-duddy stuff that interferes with a fresh meeting with the moment.
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