Don’t Be A Tool
For Gen X-ers Who Learned to Win by Avoiding the Game
Yesterday was the last of a watercolor painting class I took with my mother. My mom is a late-in-life artist, a development I admire a great deal. Like any story of someone picking up something new in midlife or beyond, it pleases me to be reminded that we are always being and becoming, we are not reduced to the output of choices made long ago.
It was highly atypical of me to do something like this, to take a class for no special reason, especially during a workday when the kids were hopefully at school. This wasn’t a doctor’s appointment or a workout that could be chalked up to utility. This was inarguably a frivolous undertaking.
On the first day, we pulled up to the church across town and I exhaled, having survived my mom’s driving.
To be clear, I’m not throwing ageist shade at her for driving at 82. I’m appropriately terrified because behind the wheel you can see firsthand that her formative years were spent in New Jersey battling the roads around the Holland Tunnel and Newark Airport, where letting anyone merge into your lane is an unacceptable sign of cowardice.
We schlepped our supplies into the church meeting room, and set up at a table together.
Visual art is something I’ve always appreciated, but avoided participating in after deciding sometime in nursery school that I wasn’t good at it. I avoided “arts and farts,” where possible or becoming a nuisance if I couldn’t get out of it.
Don’t get me wrong, I love art.
But I did not love being bad at making art.
Like other Gen X-ers, I didn’t grow up with a growth mindset. Unlike my three children, who were raised in the Stanford Lab School, the epicenter of process-oriented feedback in the long shadow of Carol Dweck, no one painstakingly praised my grit in my formative years. Like many of you, I did the smart thing. I grew up avoiding anything I wasn’t good at because struggle felt intolerable. And because being bullied for applying myself to something I wasn’t good at was not high on my list of things to do. I gravitated toward what went smoothly, what I was good at (or at least not bad at), out of the gate.
The class, we quickly learned was technique-oriented, centered on the mechanics of reproducing birds on branches, sometimes with pinecones involved.
Mom and I were terrible at it.
The teacher would wander the room, giving pointers or praise. She would begrudgingly stop at our table, and ask loudly, “What is going on here?”
Mom and I laughed our asses off when I snarkily repeated the quip throughout the class, doing my best to make it into a meme of our own.
Let’s be clear. We objectively failed at our birds and our pinecones. At least as measured by the yardstick the teacher and other skilled participants were using. But I hadn’t gone for those reasons. I wanted to play with materials. To spend time with my mother. To experiment with the paints. Not as a means to an end, but as a person inside an experience.
In Buddhist psychology there is an idea of soma, or freshness, the spark we recognize in the world when we momentarily experience without the obscuration of our default filters. The glow we experience when we have a glimpse outside of habitual neural networks. When we begin to see in color again.
Most of the time, we are not doing that. Most of the time, we have an objective. And that isn’t bad. But it does have a consequence. When everything is instrumental, we become a tool.
Art, in this case, was a field trip outside the tedium of repetition and expertise, outside intellectual shortcut inherent in repetition. A break, “when you are tired of yourself and all of your creations” as Bob Dylan put it in Queen Jane Approximately.
I was working on a painting of a bird that looked like it might well be the source of the next bird flu outbreak.
In the background, I’d been turning over a design problem for a workshop I’m holding next month: The Midlife Reality Check. The tension I couldn’t resolve in my planning was how much real estate to give the systemic forces shaping midlife women’s lives versus staying in the personal, where agency is clearer.
Both matter. That was the problem.
I kept trying to include everything that was true in my planning, and the thing kept sprawling.
What arrived while I was painting wasn’t an answer to a question. I wasn’t posing a question. I just had one of those flashes that comes sometimes. A reordering.
Being clever, jamming in all the good ideas wasn’t the priority.
I couldn’t have gotten clarity by thinking harder. I had been doing that for hours and hours.
Breakthrough, or reordered clarity emerged from doing something else entirely, specifically painting a blob of a bird with two pinecones I’ll spare you from my son’s description of.
Freshness happens when we step outside goal-orientation. Sometimes it is through play. When we are in the act of being, without agenda, there is a quality of connection that emerges that can’t be fabricated. We interact outside persona and entrenched identities. This is one of the reasons why it’s easier to make friends when we’re young, before we imagine ourselves as fully formed. Or when we’re on a new leg of the journey, having children, taking on illness, entering new terrain.
I could cite a bunch of research here. Maybe another time.
But I don’t want to bury the point.
If we make play have a purpose, a goal, we strip it of its fresh-ness. If we talk too much about how breakthroughs come when we stop trying, we take on yet another objective.
What we really want is the shower insight. The dishwashing clarity. The moment when we are no longer in the pattern of “thinker” solving a problem.
So I’ll leave you with a question:
Where in your life have you been making a tool out of yourself?
And what might be waiting for you on the other side of that?