When I was a kid, I was absolutely certain I could do anything I decided to do. Not just attempt it, mind you. I was convinced I would succeed, probably become the best at it, and eventually move on to something else that I would also be spectacular at. I don’t know if everyone grows up with that kind of confidence, but I certainly did. I had the ambition of a billionaire and the experience of someone who still needed permission to cross the street. It was a wonderful way to see the world, even if the world hadn’t yet been given much opportunity to object.
Of course, life eventually introduced itself. Turns out, wanting something doesn’t guarantee you’ll get it. Neither does working hard, being intelligent, or believing you deserve it. There are other people, circumstances, limitations, and an enormous amount of luck involved in just about everything. Like most people who didn’t stumble directly into extraordinary success, I eventually learned that confidence alone wasn’t enough. A necessary lesson, certainly, but somewhere along the way I think I learned something else that wasn’t nearly as useful. I started confusing the possibility of failure with a reason not to try.
I’ve been thinking about that quite a bit this week. Specifically, I’ve been wondering whether growing older and becoming more realistic required me to abandon that childhood belief in possibility. I certainly needed to give up the assumption that I would be the best at everything I attempted. That’s a ridiculous standard for anyone, particularly someone whose interests change as frequently as mine. But why did I also have to surrender the belief that I could walk down just about any path I wanted? Maybe the lesson wasn’t supposed to be that I couldn’t do everything. Maybe it was simply that I couldn’t guarantee the outcome.
As usual, all this thinking has spilled into my painting. I’ve spent the week working on a rather strange piece featuring my internal committee as graffiti on an old city wall. The committee, for those unfamiliar with the management structure inside my head, is my collection of competing thoughts, desires, fears, and opinions. They’re always there, offering advice nobody requested and raising objections to plans they haven’t fully understood. In the painting, they’re faded into the background, still present and still watching. There’s a sticker offering a warning in Enochian, an obstacle in the form of discarded chewing gum, and a little sidewalk engraving of Z+M with a heart, representing what matters most to me along the way. Meanwhile, a collection of stubborn purple flowers pushes up from the street, growing through the scene without much apparent concern for what anyone thinks.
It’s not my favorite painting visually, but as a sigil, a symbolic representation of an intention, it’s doing exactly what I hoped. I’m painting myself a reminder that the committee doesn’t have to agree before something happens. The warnings can exist. The obstacles can remain. I don’t have to eliminate every objection before taking a step. Sometimes the appropriate response to an obstacle is simply to walk around it. We’ve apparently become so sophisticated as a species that we can spend years contemplating the dangers of stepping in gum rather than moving six inches to the left.
And while I’ve been painting this little philosophical sidewalk, I’ve been putting the idea into practice. I’ve started applying for art residencies, exhibitions, and opportunities around the country. I’ve connected my art-related information to Muse, where my AI agent Oon is now hunting for possibilities around the clock. It’s an amusing arrangement. I spend my mornings painting strange flowers and writing essays about the human condition while a tireless digital assistant searches for places willing to let me do more of the same. The future is ridiculous, and I am delighted to participate.
But here’s the thought that keeps returning to me: Why couldn’t I spend two weeks in the mountains painting, writing, and sharing my work with a community? Why couldn’t I have a solo exhibition at an outsider art gallery? Why couldn’t I be an emerging artist at 48 years old? Who exactly decided that these opportunities belong to some other category of person? I’ve been painting for less than two years, but I’ve already created more than a hundred canvases, exhibited in galleries, and watched people take my work home to hang on their walls. None of that was happening before I started painting. Not because the opportunities were necessarily impossible, but because I wasn’t making art.
There’s something almost embarrassingly obvious about that realization. You can’t discover what might happen if you never give anything a chance to happen. I have no idea whether I’ll be accepted into these residencies or whether a gallery somewhere will decide my strange collection of flowers, crows, and philosophical graffiti belongs on its walls. I may receive a beautiful collection of rejection emails, each one politely informing me that my artistic vision would be better appreciated elsewhere. That’s fine. Rejection is an outcome. It isn’t a catastrophe, and it certainly isn’t evidence that trying was a mistake. If anything, I’d rather be rejected by an opportunity I pursued than spend another decade wondering whether I might have been accepted.
I also find this particularly entertaining given my deterministic view of existence. I don’t believe I’m some independent little captain steering the universe through the magical power of personal choice. I believe we’re products of circumstances, experiences, influences, and everything that came before us. But that doesn’t make belief irrelevant. Quite the opposite. What I believe about my possibilities becomes another influence on what I attempt, and what I attempt becomes part of what happens next. My little painting won’t magically convince the universe to hand me an art residency, but it might help convince the collection of processes I call myself to submit an application. The committee has no chairman, but apparently it has acquired a marketing department. Its latest campaign is built around the radical suggestion that we might as well give things a shot.
In many ways, this is the same lesson I’ve been learning through my years of creativity and health. Both began with an attempt at something I had never successfully sustained before. Neither came with guarantees. Yet the simple act of beginning, followed by the repeated act of continuing, changed what seemed possible. Things that once required enormous motivation became ordinary parts of my life. I didn’t need to know how everything would turn out. I only needed to create the conditions in which something could happen.
And perhaps that’s what I’m really trying to recover from childhood. Not the naive certainty that I would succeed at everything, but the freedom of believing that almost anything was worth attempting. Somewhere between childhood and middle age, we accumulate so much evidence of how difficult life can be that we sometimes forget how surprising it can be, too. We become experts at predicting why something won’t work, and eventually stop collecting evidence that it might.
I turned 48 last week. By any reasonable measure, I’m no longer the young person who assumed he could become the best at whatever caught his attention. I’ve had enough years to understand that life doesn’t distribute success according to enthusiasm, and the universe has never shown much interest in my personal expectations. But I’m also old enough to recognize that I don’t need success guaranteed in advance. I don’t even need to become particularly good at something to find enormous value in doing it. There is joy in the attempt itself, in the discovery, and in occasionally surprising myself with what happens when I stop deciding something is beyond my reach.
Maybe I’ll spend two weeks painting in the mountains. Maybe I’ll have that solo exhibition. Maybe I’ll apply to fifty opportunities and receive fifty rejections. I can’t know any of that in advance, and I’m beginning to appreciate that I don’t need to. I’m not trying to recover the belief that everything I attempt will succeed. I’m trying to recover the belief that I have every reason to attempt it anyway.
The little kid who thought he could do anything wasn’t entirely right, but perhaps he wasn’t entirely wrong, either. He simply hadn’t learned the distinction between what was possible and what was promised.
At 48, I’m finally getting comfortable with that distinction. Everything may not be possible, but far more might be possible than I’ll ever discover by standing still. And after spending so many years learning what I can’t do, I’m rather excited to find out what I still can.
So why not me? Why not give it a shot? And if there’s gum on the sidewalk, I suppose I’ll walk around it.