Tag: justifying creativity

  • Explain Yourself

    Anyone who is not a sociopath is probably, eventually going to discover the need to explain themselves to someone.  This isn’t a weakness. It’s a social legacy reality.

    We all make stuff. 

    Maybe you’re not an artist or a writer or a musician, as I write about those things here, but you might prepare food, manage money, build roads, fight for justice, heal the sick—or any of countless other jobs—and each of those things the pursuit against the entropy of the universe. It is making order out of the slide into chaos.

    And if you are doing any of this making, eventually, probably, likely someone will ask you why you have made the things you have made.

    Why? Why did you spend your time on this planet, in this life, doing this thing and making what you made? Why this?

    It would be easy to mistake this for a requisite justification of our lives, rather than for what I think it is: the realization by all of us on the side asking the question: that what makes us humans is looking into the heart of someone else’s passions and seeking to understand.

    So. If someone asks you don’t flinch and feel interrogated. Explain yourself. Share your soul. Spread your love of that thing you do.