Eric Maisel : The Van Gogh Blues: Meaningful Life, Work, Days : Page 2 of 2

Book Excerpt from The Van Gogh Blues

Meaningful Life, Meaningful Work, Meaningful Days

By Eric Maisel, PhD

(con't from page 1)

You want to articulate your life plan in a single sentence that includes a statement about your personal ethics, a statement about realizing your potential, and a statement about relationships. The life plan sentence you craft might sound like one of the following:

• “I intend to be a decent person who makes use of his native gifts and who lives a life full of creative accomplishments and loving relationships.”

• “I intend to stand up for basic principles of fairness and justice while manifesting my creative potential and relating to others in a human way.”

• “I intend to write powerfully and truthfully and share my life with at least one other person.”

• “I intend to devote my life to music while remembering that I’m a human being before I’m a musician, with other needs and obligations in addition to music.”

• “I intend to make discoveries in science while honoring the value of teaching and intimate relationships.”

• “I intend to create powerful sculptures that move people, get my sculptures into the marketplace, and live an ethical life that makes me proud.”

Creating a sentence of this sort and using it as the actual blueprint of your life are profoundly important tasks. They help keep you on track so that when a particular sculpture fails, you can say, “I made a mess. But I know what I have to do next, which is simply to try again. I can start now or I can resume tomorrow and do some other worthy thing for the rest of today, like love or be of service.” The ruination of one sculpture counts for very little in the context of your firmly held life plan.

Your life plan provides an internal yardstick against which your current behaviors can be measured. Instead of not knowing in a given situation whether, say, to speak up or keep silent — whether to tell off a particular literary agent or hold your peace, whether to march against a government action or merely shake your head ironically, whether to withdraw your support from a project or shut one eye and accept the moral imperfection of the situation — you remind yourself of your life plan sentence, test the moment against your plan’s intent, and intuitively recognize what path to take.

The very existence of your life plan has a deeply calming effect. Just as a believer is calmed by his belief in a supernatural being who is on his side or, if not on his side, at least not indifferent to his existence, a creator is calmed by having something to believe in that he himself has affirmed. His life plan sentence is his announcement that he intends to mean, and while it does not spell out specific meaning intentions, it provides an outline that is no more vague or less momentous than a believer’s belief in gods.

The Second Intention: Articulating What Constitutes Worthy Work

When a person creates, he has many goals in mind. To focus on just two, he wants to do masterful work, and he also wants to do meaningful work. These are not only different goals, but they often stand in opposition. It is possible to master a small corner of a particular intellectual discipline but not find it meaningful to restrict oneself to that corner. It is possible to master a certain painting style but not find it meaningful to endlessly repeat oneself in that style. It is possible to perfect a literary formula and at the same time hate your lack of writing depth. It is possible to create a technology business that makes money and runs beautifully and simultaneously find your product pointless.

The painter Robert Farber, confronted by the reality of his HIV disease, reported in Andrea Vaucher’s Muses from Chaos and Ash:

Three years ago I was doing only large abstract work, color fields. It was very impersonal and influenced by landscape. Then I got tired of all of that; I wanted to change everything around artistically. In therapy I was exploring the dysfunctionalism of my family. I decided that I wanted to explore nightmares that were always part of my experience, a horror I was always drawn to. At the same time, I wanted to tell the story of what it was like to use drugs in the seventies and eighties. So I started doing completely different work, figurative work. I tried to capture not only the horror of that kind of voracious pleasure seeking but the craziness of it. But intermingled with that were also personal demons that I was exorcising. This culminated with a major piece that I felt said it all: what it was like to be on drugs, the downtown scene, the pleasure and the sex and all the craziness of it.

There is no good way for a creator to answer the question of whether he should move from abstraction to realism or from realism to abstraction, from poetry to prose or from prose to poetry, from collage to film or from film to collage, except by understanding his meaning intentions and by fathoming what he considers worthy work. It isn’t that he must be able to articulate what constitutes worthy work, since it is difficult to put our thoughts into words as clearly and eloquently as Farber does in the preceding passage. But he needs to cultivate an intuitive sense of what he means by worthy work and to learn how to measure whether the creative work he means to tackle meets his own standards.

Is his budding idea for a novel worthy in his own eyes? Are his scientific pursuits worthy in his own eyes? Is his software product worthy in his own eyes? First, he must want to know. That is, he must hold the intention to investigate whether the creative work he undertakes is worthy in his own eyes. Second, he needs to actually know, to be able to distinguish in his own mind, quite imperfectly but nevertheless in a real way, between worthy and unworthy projects.

The subject of worthy creative work will occupy a later chapter. The point to remember for now is that it is vitally important that creative people put on the table the fact that they are intending to create worthy work. They can still compose musical comedies, investigate abstract mathematical ideas, paint all-red paintings, or write romances — but only if they consider these activities worthy and approach these activities righteously. By consciously announcing to themselves that they have set the bar high and intend to take their creative lives seriously, endeavoring to do work that is both masterful and meaningful, they take a giant step in the direction of forcing life to mean. •

Excerpted from the book The Van Gogh Blues: A Creative Person's Path Through Depression © 2008 by Eric Maisel. Printed with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. www.newworldlibrary.com or 800-972-6657 ext. 52.

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About the Author | More by Eric Maisel
America's foremost Creativity Coach Eric Maisel, Ph.D. is a frequent contributor to Art of the Song: Creativity Radio. These essays are reprinted with permission from his on-air segment and are excerpted from his books: "Creativity For Life"; "A Writer's Paris"; "A Writer's San Francisco"; and more. For a complete list of publications, podcasts and workshop opportunities please visit www.ericmaisel.com.

01/14/08